Episode: 172
Title: HPR0172: fluxbox tabbed windows
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0172/hpr0172.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:52:21

---

It's
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. My name is Dave and I'll be your host today on my drive
home from work. There are tornado warnings for the three counties I will be driving through
on the way home, but I don't see any tornadoes. It's not a watch, it's a warning, so it means
conditions are right. I think, anyway, it's that time of the month again, time for me to provide some
content to Hacker Public Radio and sadly I have a little to provide this month. I was without
internet last week for five days due to some thunderstorms and but I'm back and like I said,
it's my turn to speak. So real briefly today, putting my briefest Hacker Public Radio to date,
I will talk about the tab feature in FluxBox. FluxBox is a lightweight window environment for
Linux. That's where I use it early. I'm sure it's ported to other platforms, solar,
Unix kind of things, but I use it BSD, I'm sure to. I use it in Linux and I love FluxBox.
FluxBox meets all my needs and one of the features of FluxBox that is often overlooked. In fact,
I don't use it myself that much, but it is indeed a useful feature and relatively unique,
it's not completely unique. There are other window managers that have had features like this before,
but FluxBox has it as well. Some of your larger desktop environments don't do this.
This feature has been worked into COPS Fusion in a way as far as grouping Windows goes, but
FluxBox you have the Cab feature and this allows you to stack Windows together.
If you look at the FluxBox documentation, it asks you to imagine a stack of papers with little
sticky flaps on little sticky flags and the flags allow you to quickly navigate to a piece of paper
in the stack. This is in essence what the tabs do in FluxBox.
As you can stack Windows on top of each other so that they are the same size and dimension,
and it's just like all the pieces of paper are the same size and you have tabs on the top that
sort of like the sticky flags on the stack of paper analogy and you click on a tab and you
go to that window. This is really useful for multiple X terms, for instance.
You do this, the easiest way to do it in FluxBox is to open up a program, let's say X term,
and once this opens up another one and then with your middle mouse button, click and drag
the title bar of one of those X terms to the title bar of the other and let go.
And what will happen is you will see that the title bar of the X term window now has two
titles in it, two, a title for each X term, and the other settings where you can control
the size of the title of each window in the stack of tabs or the stack of Windows. So each tab
can row a shrink relative to the width of the window that's called relative or you can actually
set a set width or the tab. I don't know if I made that completely clear but what you're doing is
you're dragging one window to another using the title bar and in FluxBox the title bar often
doesn't go all the way across, it looks like a tab and you're dragging it on top of another tab,
with the middle mouse button. When you let go you will have two tabs there, one for each window
and there's even a feature where I think we just hover over a tab and that window will come to
the top and have focus and what this does allows you to keep two X term windows in the space of
one. I know there are terminal packages that have this functionality built in except the
terminal, Gnome terminal, console, I'll have tab windows but with FluxBox you're not restricted to
just X terms so you have E-M-E-M-E-L-F-M2 open and you have an X term window open. You can with your
middle mouse button click and drag from the tab and drop it on top of the tab of E-M-E-L-F-M2 but
then happen is you will have those two windows stacked on top each other, those two windows will
become the same size. I mean the car so I can't tell you which one will be resized to which one
and there was I don't know if E-M-E-L-F-M2 or if the parent tab will get resized to the child or
vice versa but the end result will be is you will have a stack of applications with tabs
so they all take up the same amount of screen at a state and you just click on a tab to bring that
application to the top. There's also a setting that I'm pretty sure is you can get to using
the navigation with the menus navigate to the configuration and you can set
I forget what exactly what it's called I think it's called sloppy
sloppy tab placement where you don't have to when you when you middle click and drag a tab or a
title bar to another window you don't have to drop it on the title bar you can drop it anywhere
in that window and that's called sloppy tab dragging or sloppy tab placement. It's a really neat
feature that I'm thinking maybe a lot of new flux box users maybe or probably and maybe some
old time flux box features features users may have forgotten about it if they didn't know about it
so it's it's a possibly underutilized feature of flux box that can come in really handy
if you want to remove a tab say you've you've you've dragged with the middle click
the tab of an extra window to your EMEL FM2 window and you don't like it there anymore all you
got to do is middle click on the tab and drag it back to the desktop so it's really pretty cool
and you know flux box allows you to turn off tabs completely if you don't like them
I'll refer you to the flux box documentation website or the website folder documentation
for tabs and advanced tab features. Anyway like I said that is a short hacker public radio
today and I apologize for the briefness of it you know that's all I got so tune in tomorrow for
another hacker public radio. Thank you for listening to hacker public radio
HPR is sponsored by caro.net so head on over to C-A-R-O dot E-N-C for all of us
