Several weeks ago I decided to enhance performance of my Linux-powered ThinkPad x120e laptop. The one of the steps was switching from XFCE's window manager to a more lightweight and configurable one. I decided to give a try to OpenBox and since then I still like it.
Being a Software Developer I cannot stand pieces of software code which are large than ~15 lines. The one of the reasons is such code is hard to maintain. The same rule is applied for configuration files as well. OpenBox's configuration file represents itself a quite large XML file called rc.xml. And I really do not like this approach. I decided to find a way to split it out to several small pieces with the corresponding responsibility zones.
At first glance because of XML we could use a mechanism called External Entity. After this attempt was failed I discovered in the source code of OpenBox that processing of such entities is disabled and I get started to send a patch to enable it. But right away I found that XInclude mechanism is supported. After googling it was discovered that this feature was added in 2010. Now my OpenBox rc.xml is split to several files and looks like this:
Note: because of syntax highlighter bug extra HTML tags may appear in this snippet. Please ignore them.
Where each include represents a corresponding configuration section. For example, resistance.xml:
As for me this is a very underrated feature which is not covered even in the official documentation. It makes the configuration components of OpenBox more granular and modular.
Note: Please be aware that OpenBox GUI configuration tools such as obconf may handle (and currently they do!) such files with XInclude`s.
Being a Software Developer I cannot stand pieces of software code which are large than ~15 lines. The one of the reasons is such code is hard to maintain. The same rule is applied for configuration files as well. OpenBox's configuration file represents itself a quite large XML file called rc.xml. And I really do not like this approach. I decided to find a way to split it out to several small pieces with the corresponding responsibility zones.
At first glance because of XML we could use a mechanism called External Entity. After this attempt was failed I discovered in the source code of OpenBox that processing of such entities is disabled and I get started to send a patch to enable it. But right away I found that XInclude mechanism is supported. After googling it was discovered that this feature was added in 2010. Now my OpenBox rc.xml is split to several files and looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <openbox_config xmlns="http://openbox.org/3.4/rc" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"> <xi:include href="resistance.xml"/> <xi:include href="focus.xml"/> <xi:include href="placement.xml"/> <xi:include href="theme.xml"/> <xi:include href="desktops.xml"/> <xi:include href="resize.xml"/> <xi:include href="margins.xml"/> <xi:include href="dock.xml"/> <xi:include href="keyboard.xml"/> <xi:include href="mouse.xml"/> <xi:include href="menu.xml"/> <xi:include href="applications.xml"/> </openbox_config>
Note: because of syntax highlighter bug extra HTML tags may appear in this snippet. Please ignore them.
Where each include represents a corresponding configuration section. For example, resistance.xml:
<resistance> <strength>10</strength> <screen_edge_strength>20</screen_edge_strength> </resistance>
As for me this is a very underrated feature which is not covered even in the official documentation. It makes the configuration components of OpenBox more granular and modular.
Note: Please be aware that OpenBox GUI configuration tools such as obconf may handle (and currently they do!) such files with XInclude`s.
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