Since I believe it's still legal in some countries to pummel the snot out of people for not providing screenshots with their applications, here's some of ours... =:) These screenshots, it should be noted, are from the first release of bbconf and may at some point change. But they should also give you a good enough understanding of how the application looks and feels....

A brief word should be said about bbconf's plugins. If you build bbconf by hand, you are able to control where bbconf installs its files, including where it installs its plugins. More will be said of this on the download page for bbconf. But bbconf will look in two places for its plugins. It will look first in the installation directory for plugins as configured at compile-time. It will also look in $HOME/.bbconf for any .so files (plugins) that you may want to use with bbconf. This means that you don't have to have root authority on the machine you're building bbconf on to use it, and that you can add plugins for bbconf at any time simply by copying them to $HOME/.bbconf

It's that simple. And now, our screenshots.... Feel free to click on the preview images to see a full-size image.

This is bbconf's main "window" or form. It's pretty much a brief welcome plugin that also allows configuration changes that affect bbconf as a whole. As of this initial release, this entails configuring the "Qt style" that the application uses, such as a Motif look and feel, a Windows look and feel, the Platinum look and feel, a CDE look and feel, etc., etc. As this application grows and develops, there may be other configuration options that you will want, or we will need to add.

Changes that are made to the bbconf app are currently saved to $HOME/.bbconf/bbconf.bb. This is all handled automatically by bbconf.

This is the keybindings editor plugin that has taken the place of the previous bbkeysconf application. It is a much cleaner look and feel as you can see, and is more similar to other popular keybindings editors. The interface is very intuitive, and should be very easy to use.

A note on the keybindings.. As of blackbox version 0.6x, all keycombos and keybindings have been removed from blackbox and are handled by the external application called bbkeys. This allows for far-greater flexibility in keycombos and greater user control over their window session. It also allows the maintainers of bbkeys to add new features and functionality to the keybinding part of your blackbox X sessions without having to wait for the next blackbox window manager release. Incidentally, the same authors who bring you bbconf also maintain bbkeys. =:)

bbkeys is completely configurable, including the look and feel of itself as well as keycombos/keybindings to interact with your windows in X. It works only with blackbox at the current time, but the next release of blackbox promises to allow bbkeys to work with any WM-spec compliant window manager you desire to use.

It is also entirely possible that the author of blackbox will choose to change things around and bring some basic keybindings back into blackbox, in which case inter-operability between blackbox and bbkeys will be slightly more complex, but the two will still work perfectly together.

All this to say... if you use bbconf to configure keycombos and keybindings for blackbox, you also need to make sure that you have installed the bbkeys application that enables these keybindings.

To the left, you see the brand new blackbox menu editor. It understands your blackbox menu files and allows you to quickly configure, add to, and remove from your blackbox menu. When you apply your changes, your menu file will be rewritten and saved--including nicely indenting your menu file, resulting in a much easier to read and cleaner menu file.

It should also be mentioned that when you apply your changes to your blackbox menu file, they will take affect immediately.

To the right, you see the new blackbox theme editor. This has taken the place of the previous "toolbox" GUI application. (Read: toolbox is dead, long live the bbconf theme plugin)

This plugin allows you to completely and easily configure every aspect of the look and feel (style/theme) of your blackbox session, including the look and feel of your blackbox menus, blackbox's toolbar, and the window decorations and settings. By default, it will open up the blackbox style file that you're currently using with blackbox and allow you to make changes to it. Assuming you're working on the style file that blackbox is currently using, and also assuming that you are able to write to this file (i.e. make sure you can save to the file that you're working with), when you click the "Apply" button in bbconf, bbconf will save your changes and blackbox will reconfigure itself automatically to start using the changed style.

This plugin also allows you to open a different file and also to save any file you're working with as a completely different style filename. *NOTE* Clicking "Apply" in either of these situations will simply cause bbconf to save your changes to disk--blackbox will not know to pick up these changes until you tell blackbox to use this new style file.

As you can see in the preview screenshot, this bbconf plugin includes a file dialog preview window, allowing you to EASILY choose the image you want to use for your background/root window image. No more having to browse all your images with an external graphics program like gimp or xv--simply use bbconf's theme editor plugin and you can see the image you're choosing for your theme's background image.