Tint2 launcher, screwed

... and Conky screwed too

So I played with wallpapering Openbox, one thing led to another and I decided to amuse myself with panel-decorating, bitmapwise.
Tint2 doesn't support adding image as a panel background and consequently - only option is to stick 'panel' onto wallpaper. Easiest to do it is with layered Gimp file - so you can shuffle your wallpapers under panel and then export them as paneled wallpapers.
Now, what I wanted to do, was very slightly steampunkish appearance. Nothing overwhelmingly fancy like brass pipes, cogwheels, rayguns etc. 'Classic' SPs enormously overstuffed spaces are not my cup of tea.
I am not going to explain my confs' parameters here. Tweaking is reasonably easy thing to do - if using material here (tint2), and here (conky), and here (conky).

It came out like that:

-- wallpaper and 'panel'-ribbon below tint and conky are one jpg.

-- Left side, width 71% - is Tint2. All on-top backgrounds and borders are done by tint and so, easily tunable. Launcher has 5 png-icons.
- Left screw in launcher opens Openbox menu (xdotool key super+q
as exec in obmenu.desktop). Desktop file has to be made. Keybind itself has to be also defined, of course, in rc.xml (for 'root-menu', and here the same key is 'W-q'). Xdotool might not be installed by default (it is in Crunchbang and Vsido). In Slackware it is not installed, but can be made from SBO .
- Right screw is 'show/hide desktop', also through xdotool, key 'super+d'('W-d' in rc.xml).
As both those actions are quite pointless (why not to use keybinds stright...), then other tasks can be put here - exit script, weather conky, or whatever.
When making screws or other tiny icons - make png-s bigger with transparent padding, it gives bigger clickable area. Those here are 16px visible, but 24px with transparency.
Whole tint-tuning is simple playing around with numbers and colors (gcolor2 helps with choosing colors). Though, this play-around takes considerable amount of time...
... Of easy tunability - I haven't yet found error-proof way to restart tint (to see changes). For example:
'killall tint2' and start = corrupted taskbar/tasks (double?)
'kill -9 tint2' and start = no systray items
'killall -SIGUSR1 tint2' and start = corrupted systray (double?)
So, after a while I end up doing logout/login, and then decide that's enough of tint ...


-- Right side, 477px wide - Conky. Conky supports background images. So this dark-brown background-with-screws png-file sits in Conky.
I have to say - it took me some time to get Conkys' conf right. Partly because Conky (also) is not loading everything anew when conf is saved and Conky refreshes. Took me some time to realize that... Better to go for killall-method.
Key thing here is to comment those
#own_window_argb_visual yes
#own_window_argb_value 0
#own_window_colour 534821
and leave the next one working and 'yes'
own_window_transparent yes
Beacuse 'argb' things make your image transparent too...

Tuning conky is a bit trickier than tuning tint2. When pressed to this narrow form, quite many numbers have to be expressly '0', like border_inner_margin 0 for example. And see CPU-usage - it has to have spare space to expand. When numbers get into tens, you don't want your whole conky jumping bigger and hitting volumeicon or whatever.
Oh, and those screws here are just decorations.
What complicated things for me was - I didn't want to add panel to every wallpaper. So it turned to balancing act between tint on relatively light panel and tint on relatively dark wallpapers. It boiled down to playing with colors, and using upper layer (tint, conky) backgrounds without very much of transaparency.

And conclusion: oldish-90s-looking panel can be done with tint and conky. Also, I really like the idea of using screws as launchers. :)
Oh, and - do really use those tint and conky links, and info there - as all possible commands are NOT included in default conf files.
| NB! As it was my first time to include pics, I was quite annoyed when I got persistent error with inserting pics (impossible to insert)... Turned out that Googles' spymasters want popups and all cookies enabled... So I installed separate browser, all security-panties down, just for 'insert pic', and nothing else. But cookies will be deleted afterwards anyway. Quite, quite irritating. |