CrabbyPanel is a lightweight and simple panel program, intended to mimic (to a certain extent) the look and feel of the panel in Fluxbox. In brief, a panel is an application that works with a window manager, typically providing (at minimum) controls for maximizing/minimizing windows with the mouse.
The primary reason for the creation of CrabbyPanel was because Openbox 3 didn't provide one at the time I began using it. However, CrabbyPanel is ICCCM and NET_WM compliant, so it should theoretically work with any window manager that also supports these specifications.
Visit the CrabbyPanel homepage for updates and further info.
CrabbyPanel may be invoked directly from a shell, however most users will probably want it to start automatically whenever X starts. To do this, simply invoke crabbypanel from your ~/.xinitrc file.
Once started, CrabbyPanel may be terminated cleanly by sending it a SIGUSR1 signal or by shutting down X.
When started CrabbyPanel reads user supplied configuration information from ~/.crabbypanel. Note that in the traditional UNIX fashion, command-line options take precedence over these options.
The general format of the configuration is quite simple and should be familiar to most UNIX users. Each line consists of a variable identifier, a colon, and a variable value. The variable identifier must consist of a letter or underscore followed by 0 or more letters, underscores, and digits. The variable value must be either a double quoted string, an integer, or a boolean (true/false). Aribitrary length runs of space/tabs/newlines are ignored and may be inserted freely be the user. The usual single line pound-style ('#') comments are supported as well. Unrecognized options or those with invalid format are skipped and will not flag an error.
Here's a simple example of how a .crabbypanel file might be structured:
# this is a comment top_of_screen: false percent_width: 72 time_format: "%I:%M"
Here are the currently valid options:
The height (in pixels) the panel should use on screen. The default is 30 pixels.
Amount (in percent) of the screen the panel should occupy horizontally. The default is 90 percent.
A string passed verbatim to strftime in order to format the clock. See 'man strftime' for how to contruct this string. The default is "%I:%M", which gives the number of hours in twelve hour format, a colon, and the number of minutes in the current hour.
true to place the panel at the top of the screen, false to place the panel at the bottom of the screen. The default is false.
This man page, as well as CrabbyPanel itself, were created by Chris Utz <vod12481@users.sourceforge.net>.