Using the keyboard in PEKWM

Pekwm allows excellent keyboard control of your window management. Lets try it out a bit. If you don't have the windows key on your keyboard, please see ~/.pekwm/keys for the keychains you can use to do the same and a lot more.

Moving and Resizing windows. --> special MoveResize state. This happens by pressing Mod4+Enter. The window should after this be movable by using the arrow keys. To resize, press Mod4(=Super or Windows key) and use the arrows. Using the Shift-key with these actions makes them be careful. To accept the new size and position, press Enter. To fail back to the old position and size press Escape.

Minimizing. Press Mod4+I. Mod4+Shift+I pops up the icon menu you can use to bring it back.

Shading. This is to hide most of the window, leaving only the titlebar visible. Press Mod4+S to toggle the shaded state.

Maximizing. Mod4+M toggles the maximized state.

Filling (making a window grow as big as it can in the space it has around it). Press Mod4+G to make windows grow to fit.

Fullscreen. Press Mod4+F to toggle the fullscreen state.

Moving between frames. Press Mod1(=Alt)+Tab and Mod1+Shift+Tab to move between frames. Or use Mod1+Ctrl+Tab and Mod1+Ctrl+Shift+Tab to move between most recently used frames. You can also use directional focusing. Press Mod4 and one of the arrow keys. The focus should change to the frame that is in the direction you pointed to. Try it out.

Moving inside frames. Press Mod4+Tab and Mod4+Shift+Tab to move between the clients in a frame.

Closing. Press Mod4+Q to close windows.

Grouping. The easiest way to group is to use marking. You select clients you want to group to another frame by toggling them marked with Mod4+Z. You can have as many marked clients as you wish. Then go to the frame you want those now marked clients to be attached and press Mod4+A. That's it.

Menus. There are some simple menu bindings. Mod4+R shows your main menu (the Root menu). Mod4+L shows a list of your active windows (the Goto menu). Mod4+C shows a list of all your open windows (the Goto menu). Mod4+W brings up the Window menu. And Mod4+Shift+I the Icon menu.

Those were the basics. There's a ton more. See the rest of the documentation for rest of the simple bindings and ~/.pekwm/keys for a list of the keychains. And again, if you hated something, go ahead and edit it.
source: here and here

Making Keybindings in OpenBox more accessible with Conky

Open box is a wonderful clean window manager that is very low on resources when you start an openbox session. And if you use the wonderful Tranquility Open box theme computung starts to get really nice. (Don't miss the wonderful pine background).

The best place to start is Urukrama weblog that has a very clear and easy install guide for Open box and all kind of extra possiblities to enrich the OpenBox environment.
When I was asked to prepare a pc for a 12 year old child on a old 500 mhz Pentium my thoughts immediately were about how to make the OpenBox environment easy and super user-friendly.
In the Crunchbang distro. that I didn't want to use I saw how conky was used as a reminder for keybindings for starting programs. In openBox keybindings are very easily set in the rc.xml file in ./config/openbox. There is a gui program that is to be used when setting a theme for instance, Obconfig, a fine program but without the possibility to set keybindings. The basics are explained here.
Urukrama gives some suggestions for using keybindings to start programs. Here is what I have defined as keybindings.



And here is the .conkyrc file that comes with it and is palced in the ./home folder:

# conky configuration
#
# The list of variables has been removed from this file in favour
# of keeping the documentation more maintainable.
# Check http://conky.sf.net for an up-to-date-list.
#
# For ideas about how to modify conky, please see:
# http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/59/my-conky-config/
#
# For help with conky, please see:
# http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/2047/conky-help/
#
# Enjoy! :)
##############################################
# Settings
##############################################
background yes
use_xft yes
xftfont Sans:size=8
xftalpha 1
update_interval 1.0
total_run_times 0
own_window yes
own_window_transparent no
own_window_type desktop
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
minimum_size 200 200
maximum_width 240
draw_shades yes
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders no
default_color white
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color white
alignment top_right
gap_x 12
gap_y 12
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
cpu_avg_samples 2
override_utf8_locale no
##############################################
# Output
##############################################
TEXT
SYSTEM INFO:
${hr}
Host:$alignr$nodename
Uptime:$alignr$uptime
RAM:$alignr$mem/$memmax
Swap usage:$alignr$swap/$swapmax
Disk usage:$alignr${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
CPU usage:$alignr${cpu cpu0}%


SHORTCUT KEYS:
${hr}
Alt+F2$alignr Run Dialog
Alt+F3$alignr Alt Menu
Super+space$alignr Programma Menu
Super+tab$alignr Client Menu
Super+t$alignr Terminal
Super+f$alignr Bestanden
Super+e$alignr Tekstje
Super+m$alignr Mediaspeler
Super+w$alignr Web Browser
Super+g$alignr Graphics Editor
Super+a$alignr Afbeeldingen
Super+l$alignr Word
Super+p$alignr Programma Paneel
Super+b$alignr Branden
Super+o$alignr Logout
PrtSc$alignr Screenshot

B.t.w you can find a wonderful closedown menu and script here (Python).