I miss Blackbox
A couple of years ago back at the win2k times I’ve been using a great shell replacement called Blackbox for windows.
Ever-since I stopped using it, (does not run well on Vista) I’ve been missing its great features.
While getting many valuable help from the autohotkey community, I started to create SecondShell, to bring back those missing shell features. This is what you can download on the main page.
The rest of the features of Blackbox can be nicely solved with cool free utilities.
What made Blackbox such a great shell?
Definitely not eye-candy. Most of its styles were either ugly, or was using tiny little 5 pixel fonts or both. However I tried to create some nice styles for that.
But Blackbox is fast. No graphic files to be rendered at all, just the taskbar and titlebar gradients. And it is flexible through its configuration files.
Also it has magnificent features that make it very comfortable. I try to show you the alternatives I’m currently using.
- Virtual desktops. Virtual desktops are just great, provide a huge productivity boost. I have tried literally all available virtual desktop software (actually this is how I found Blackbox itself) the best you can have is VirtuaWin.
- Pagers. Many people use pagers with virtual desktops. The pager is the visual representation of the virtual desktops, sometimes they show little screenshots in them, sometimes only show you which of the desktops are active, and also you can click the desktop you want to switch to. If you use Samurize -and you should- there is a great plugin called VirtuaSam that that acts as a pager for the VirtuaWin virtual desktop manager.
- Custom menus. Somehow I have overlooked the great tool called True Launch Bar and only found that a couple of weeks ago. TLB basically substitutes your quicklaunch icons, but you can have menus instead of icons, and also many plugins that either measure CPU load and memory consumption, show the weather or even control your media player. The menus can be edited and customized easily with a few mouse clicks, and point to drives, folders, shortcuts, control panel items, anything really.
You can also have so called Tear Off menus, that can be shown anywhere on the desktop wherever your mouse is not just in your taskbar. Yuri, the developer of TLB has just provided me with an extra feature, showing these custom menus by right-clicking the desktop, which was the killer feature of Blackbox. See TLB in action. - Customizable hotkeys. That is implemented in SecondShell.
- Customizable mouse actions. The most important ones are implemented in SecondShell.
- Horizontal and Vertical maximization of windows. That is implemented in SecondShell.
