Invoke Openbox's Menu with xdotool
Something I wanted to do with my Openbox install was to call the main Openbox menu from my instance of tablaunch. I wanted to do this as it's not always easy/possible to find and area of the desktop to right-click on, especially when operating on a small screen with maximised windows.
As luck would have it, somebody had already found a solution for this and published details about it on the Arch Linux wiki. The solution involves installing a small utility called xdotool. There's no package for xdotool in the Ubuntu repositories, so I've created one and placed it in the CrunchBang Linux repository.
For future reference; follow the steps below to install xdotool and configure Openbox so that you can summon the main menu from a command:
1. Install xdotool, either from source, via the .deb file, or via the repository with the following command:
sudo apt-get install xdotool
2. Edit Openbox's rc.xml file and add the following code to the "keyboard" section:
<keybind key="A-C-q">
<action name="ShowMenu">
<menu>root-menu</menu>
</action>
</keybind>
3. Reconfigure Openbox to apply the changes, enter the following command:
openbox --reconfigure
4. Call the Openbox menu with the following command:
xdotool key ctrl+alt+q
It should now be possible to bind the menu to your favourite application launcher, such as tablaunch or wbar.
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