An introduction to editing Kickbox with templates.

You program Kickbox by editing text-based files. That's how you construct and organize the menus, set the shortcuts, choose the html links for the kickpage, and even determine the color schemes of the menus. This may seem archaic if you're used to setting preferences for interfaces with gui menus, but the beauty of text files is that they can be saved, reused, shared, transferred to different computers and different distros.

In preparing the menu, the key and the kickbox files, I have added simple templates to the original fluxbox configuration files. This should not only make programming Kickbox exactly how you like it extremely easy, it should also make programming Kickbox extremely easy to learn. It was never especially difficult... but now, there's an excellent chance that you'll be able to skip most if not all of the complete and excruciating exegesis that I intend to provide here.

The templates are simply menu items with the specific information left out, and the "#" ("comment") symbol at the front of the line.

For example, here are somelines from my own personal "web pages" menu:


[exec] (youtube) {firefox http://www.youtube.com}
[exec] (netflix) {firefox http://www.netflix.com}
[exec] (npr) {firefox http://www.npr.org}
[exec] (CoolText) {firefox http://www.cooltext.com}
[exec] (Commercials I hate) {firefox http://www.mad-about-ads.com/}
[exec] (myspace) {firefox http://www.myspace.com}
[exec] (linux commands) {firefox http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/}
[exec] (This American Life) {firefox http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Archive.aspx}
[exec] (image shack) {firefox http://imageshack.us/}
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }
#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }


The top part is menu items, the bottom part is potential menu items. There's an excellent chance that just by looking at these lines, you'll be able to edit one of the bottom lines to add a fast link to any web page you desire. Study the menu for a few minutes, and you may be able to figure out that:

#[exec] () {firefox http://www. }


just needs a title and a web url to become

[exec] (All About Kickbox) {firefox http://www.allaboutkickbox.blogspot.com}


So you may not need to read most of the tedious crap I'm about to write. Good luck with that.

If you need it, it's going to be here, lavishly illustrated with screenshots, and indexed so that you'll be able to find what you're looking for without too much pain. But the principles are simple, and I'm going to repeat them over and over and over. The following in

Next comes a couple of hints, however, that you're going to want to know. You may want to read these; they're brief.