Well now. Welcome to the website for bbkeys. =:)

I'll start this off with a posting from the original blackbox window manager code, Brad 'nyz' Hughes. It's VERY old, and can be seen online (and with the original follow-ups) here.

From: Bradley T. Hughes Subject: special announcement Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 14:58:27 -0800 ok people... i have done something that should be well received... i have made 0.60.0-alpha available... take a look at http://blackbox.alug.org/alpha.html before even *thinking* about downloading it... this is NOT A FULL BLOWN RELEASE... this is just a snapshot of my current source tree... and will change frequently read alpha.html twice... then read it again... once you understand that this is *alpha* software... download it and play with it... also... i have made Jason Kasper's bbkeys slitapp available as well... read the docs on how to configure the little jewel... regards :) Blackbox - An X11R6 Window Manager http://blackbox.alug.org/ __________________________________ Bradley T. Hughes <bhughes@tcac.net>

Confused? =:) Prior to this above posting from Brad, blackbox handled its own keybindings. Brad and I worked together for the few months prior to this alpha release on pulling out all the keybindings for blackbox and allowing an external application to handle them for it. I wrote bbkeys--the application that does just that.

Originally, bbkeys was a very simple C program with less than 100 lines of code. But I decided that it might be of some value to the blackbox user if they would have an icon of some sort on their screen that they could use to launch the configuration program of their choice to configure their keybindings in blackbox. Thus, I rewrote bbkeys inside the framework of John Kennis's bbtools. Kennis has written numerous other programs for blackbox, including bbpager, bbmail, bbppp, bbdate, and others. His work can be found here.

bbkeys has grown tremendously in functionality since I first wrote it. During 2001, Ben 'xOr' Jansens started helping me with bbkeys. His contributions include the stacked cycling code that bbkeys now offers--a much better window-cycling mechanism--as well as the menuing code that bbkeys uses to show its user a list of open windows to cycle through. Thanks to patches and contributions from around the world, bbkeys now allows blackbox to rival the key-driven functionality of the other window managers. Almost anything you want to do with windows in blackbox can be done through bbkeys interfacing with blackbox.

Now, bbkeys is just one example of what having an external-to-the-window-manager program handling keybindings can be like. Another extremely well-written keygrabber for blackbox is the epistrophy code that Scott 'woodblock' Moynes has written. Having keybindings managed outside of the window manager has meant that even though blackbox development has stopped for over a year, the keyboard interface to blackbox has grown and developed in exciting ways. The future remains to be seen for this, though. Sean 'shaleh' Perry has taken over development for blackbox and it will be his call as to what happens with keybindings and blackbox.