How To: Get the Most Out of Your Desktop with Shell Replacements

Posted 10/29/2008 at 2:30pm | by Alex Castle

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bbLean

bbLean is part of a family of freeware shell replacements that also includes BB4Win and xoblite. Most plugins and styles are across all members of this family of open source programs, so although we’ll be talking about bbLean specifically, the other programs function very similarly. The “bb” stands for “Blackbox,” the Unix window manager that they are all modeled after. By default, bbLean takes a minimalist approach to shell replacement, offering little more than a single task bar, an enhanced right-click menu, and lots and lots of empty room.

It doesn’t have to stay that way, though. There are a ton of plugins available, programmed by bbLean’s very active community, allowing you to customize your desktop with everything from calendars to weather reports to Winamp controllers. Installing a plugin involves downloading it, unzipping it into bbLean’s plugin directory, and adding a line to the shell’s plugins.rc file, telling it to use the addon. This last part can be also be done by right clicking anywhere, then selecting Blackbox > Configuration > Plugins > Add Plugin.

Almost all customization beyond simple movement of features (which can be done by control-clicking and dragging) in bbLean is done by altering lines in various config files. There’s a tremendous amount of flexibility in what can be changed this way, but it does mean that the learning curve for bbLean’s family of shell replacements is very steep, and until you become familiar with how all the .rc files and such work, it can be hard to get bbLean to work just the way you want it to.

One of the very cool things about the Blackbox-style shell replacements is that they’re based on the idea that function and appearance should be separated wherever possible. That means that you can drastically alter the look of your bbLean desktop without changing its layout or function. This is done with “.style” text files which contain information about all the aspects of the desktops appearance, like colors and fonts. Thus, you can use anyone else’s style files with your Blackbox shell, even if you’re running totally different plugins. Style files work cross-platform, too, so you can use styles from the actual Blackbox window system.

Below, you can see some example of how users of Blackbox-type shell replacements use a combination of styles and plugins to create some really impressive desktops:

Like Talisman, bbLean does not by default replace explorer.exe as the default shell. To do this, there is an “install” option in the right click menu, or you can just type “Blackbox –install” into the command line. Type “Blackbox –uninstall” to revert to explorer.exe.