How to install Openbox themes on Linux?

Openbox is an amazing window manager, with dozens of themes available. Unfortunately, due to the little publicity it receives, not many Linux users know how to install OpenBox themes.

"Obconf" o The Openbox Configuration Tool is an application that Linux users can install to modify many different settings in the Openbox window manager.

With the users can change themes, change dock settings, and more. The Obconf tool is an important part of Openbox, so any Linux distribution that already distributes Openbox easily should also have the Obconf tool available for installation.

To install it, open a terminal and use your package manager to search for "obconf".
Before installing new themes in the Openbox window manager, you will first need to install the Obconf tool.

Obconf installation on Linux

To install this tool on our system, we can do it directly from our repositories since Obconf is found in most current Linux distributions.

We will only have to open a terminal and execute some of the commands that we share below. So for those who are Users of Debian, Ubuntu or any other distribution derived from these will have to execute the following command:

sudo apt install obconf

If they are For users of Arch Linux, Manjaro, Antergos or any other Arch Linux-based distro, we install it with:

sudo pacman -S obconf

In the case of those who are Fedora, RHEL, CentOS and derivative users should type the following:

sudo dnf install obconf

Finally, for those who are users of any version of OpenSUSE the command they will use is the following:

sudo zypper in obconf

Searching and installed themes in Openbox

There are many places where users can find Openbox themes on the net, so pThey will be able to find topics on different sites.

Openbox themes downloaded from websites generally come in several different formats.
Some formats are the compiled OBT format and others are compressed files that the user needs to compile manually.

Since they found a theme and downloaded it, let's proceed to open the Obconf tool and select the "Theme" tab.

Inside the tab, look for the option "Install a new theme" and click on it. From here, we are going to navigate to the folder where we previously downloaded the chosen theme and with this we will have to have the theme added to our system.

Compilation of themes

The second method to install Openbox themes, as mentioned above is to compile a theme manually.
This is sometimes necessary as not all Openbox theme developers put an OBT file for download.
Fortunately, it doesn't take long and it's not really that complicated. Basically we only have to download the compressed theme and after the download we have to unpack the theme, generally these come in zip or tar.

Now that everything has been extracted, open the Obconf tool and click on "theme". Look at the bottom of the application for the button «Create a theme file (.obt)» and click on it. Using the file explorer that appears, find the folder resulting from the previously performed extraction.

In a few seconds, Obconf will print a message stating that the new topic was 'created successfully'. Go back to Obconf and select the "Install a new theme" button.

Here we will use the file browser again to find the new OBT file. Please note that these new files they are usually stored in / home / username /.

Other theme settings

Within this area, users can change different Openbox WM settings. To change the way Openbox handles borders, animations among other things.
Of which they will be able to get to know its functionalities by editing the values ​​it has.
When you are satisfied with these changes, click the "close" button at the bottom to exit.