fbctrl utility to restore the old Fluxbox 0.1.x window switch behaviour.

Hi,

due to the fact that i need to migrate the last weeks from Fluxbox
0.1.14 to 1.0rc3 i was wondering why the old 'Mod1 Tab' and 'Mod1 Shift
Tab' behaviour was no longer working in this release. Well most people i
think like the new window switch handling, but i was using the old
behaviour since ages. Differences between old and new behaviour.

New:

Press 'Alt+Tab' to switch to next window. Press 'Alt+Tab' again
switching back to old window. Press 'Alt' hold it down and press 'Tab'
multiple times will switch through windows. This feature is like under
MS Windows i think.

Old:

Press 'Alt+Tab' to switch to next window. Press 'Alt+Tab' again switch
to next window and so on... You can only go back to the old window with
pressing 'Alt+Shift+Tab'.

I really like that old model but need a recent fluxbox with XRandR
support, thats why i was migrating. But i did not found any
configuration option which would give me back the old behaviour.

Why not patching fluxbox?
-------------------------

Well first: I did not know enough about C++ :( Also the advantage of
'fbctrl' is that it is compatible with nearly any window manager and
has only one dependency libX11.

Why not using the tools available like bbkeys or wmctrl?
--------------------------------------------------------

Well bbkeys has four drawbacks: First it only compile if blackbox is
installed. I use fluxbox now since a long time and don't want to
install blackbox too.

The second drawback is, if you bind 'Alt+Tab' and 'Alt+Shift+Tab' to
bbkeys and the workspace switcher to fluxbox keys your are in trouble.
If you press Alt and hold it down everything is fine until you start to
press Tab or F1. The application which is configured to control this key
combination will control Alt until you release the key. So binding
'Alt+F1' to fluxbox and 'Alt+Tab' to bbkeys result in stuck behaviour if
you want switch focus and workspace with one keypress sequence.

The third drawback is that you need to start bbkeys after fluxbox which
is very crazy if you are not using a session manager. The only way is to
build a shellscript which starts fluxbox as background process sleep
some time (depending on your system load this can be enough or not :))
and then start bbkeys.

The fourth drawback is that if you need to restart your fluxbox, bbkeys
sometimes crashes and need to be restartet in a new terminal.

Okay and for wmctrl: It is a very nice application. (most of the 'fbctrl'
code is based on it) The problem with wmctrl is that you need to build a
complex wrapper script around it. Make some high load on your system and
try to switch the windows... :)

Maybe some of the fluxbox users will find it useful, at least me,
because fluxbox is my only window manager now since years. :) If someone
wants to test it, it can be grabbed here:

https://babelize.org/fbctrl.php

--Maik

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