Let me take a shot at these:

1. Plugins are fine, these days. Bug hit ya sometimes, but I find them to be stable. WinT wouldn't use it if it wasn't. Icons shouldn't be lost if you use an alt shell as your shell. It is known to happen in obscure cases, but it seems to always get fixed.
2. You'll have to add a plugin for that. I don't know how to do the recycle bin, but I bet there is a module to handle that. What do you do with them? Just click them?
3. Yes.
4. Lose? None. Well, some icon control. You can add display to it, but you can put anything anywhere. It's pretty sweet.
5. Yes. You don't have to pick just one shell. You can have a shell changer to pick your shell on boot and change it on the fly. You can also set up different users to have different shells, so that's another way to do it, even. Point here is you can have fun trying out other shells and see what they have to offer.

What I think would be cool is if you could have a "My Computer" icon you could click on to show a one level menu of the drives and crap. I don't know how to do it, but it's something I might look into.

Also, feel free to ask me stuff. This kinda stuff is fun for me. I recommend LS too. >:}

thanks for the reply, red.

1. that's good. i just remember people complaining about buggy plugins.

2. well, i use them as i normally would. i use "my computer" to browse my computer (when i don't feel like using win + r), and i browse through the recycle bin to view my deleted files, delete/restore files, etc. i don't know how robust the recycle bin module is in other shells. what do people usually do to view/delete/restore deleted items?

3. sweet!

4. ahh that's good to know.

5. hehe i actually played around with shellon a couple years ago when i was experimenting with shells. i've tried litestep, bb4win, carbon, sharpe, geoshell before, but couldn't get into it then.

oh, i just thought of one more question. i use the taskbar frequently, and flashing buttons (e.g. when i get a message) are very useful. do alternative shells implement flashing buttons on the taskbar (or equivalent)?

Modern ones do. I believe xTaskbar does it in LS. Black box (at least bbLean) does it too. That's really not a roblem anymore. Task grouping is another story, I think, but I hate that 'feature'.

xTaskbar has both grouping and flashing. Grouping is a bit different than it is under Explorer though. Under Explorer is only groups when the taskbar is full, xTaskbar does it from the start.

Ofcourse that means using LiteStep.

nice. i hate taskbar grouping, but flashing is essential. glad to know it's implemented. ^_^

BBLean ALL THE WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Best damn thing I've ever put on this machine of mine

lol i've never seen a more enthusiastic cheerleader. i'll be checking out litestep and bblean.

You won't regret the BBLean attempt my friend... though can't speak for LS, tried it, too much for my taste, a little to much configuration if there ever was such a thing BBLean is good to go, right out of the box, though you'll want to modify it of course, but it's good to go either way.

dreamz: while you're at it check emerge desktop, sharpe, xoblite, geoshell and bluebox

Couldn't help myself and fiddled a little with BBlean yesterday. It's nice and friendly alright, though I spend first 15 minutes staring at screen, 1cm before monitor, before I found the setting to get rid of that tiny, unreadable font that's in all default themes. But once I could read stuff, open rc and other files from menu, I can see how to get it to work, and it's much alike I now do my menu's in html/css. Easy/understandable to modify indeed.

One thing I couldn't find, and not sure if even there, is a setting to get some spacing/padding for items (still clickable). I see that a lot in any shell's screenshots, everything so crammed together. Is that because people are concerned about space stuff takes ?

[Slightly off-topic (sorry dreamz, but just requires one answer)]

Sryo, I'm trying to get a grasp of the shell replacements with a real future. So far have Litestep, bblean, SharpE, GeoShell, Emerge Desktop, xoblite, BlueBox. Officially stopped, as far as I can see, bb4win and Core. Anything I'm missing here ?

[/off-topic]

a couple of other officially stopped shells are metro, spark, cloud9ine (it evolved into other apps) and carbon lokai (it may return some day).
sidestep is a new branch of litestep that uses gdi+ for it's graphics, and purels is another older branch coded in pure c. xstep was renamed litestep 0.25 and is located in dev.litestep.com

LiteStep is like a fungus. It won't die and new variants pop up all the time.

Ah, plastic tried BBLean. I hate you didn't find quite what you wanted with the padding features.

I can say this though.. frankly... I'm not real clear on what all that is, but, I can tell you that if you go to the BBLean menu (I renamed mine to "Shell", so forget the exact default name), and go to the Options menu, then to the MISC menu, there's a "Snap" submenu there with options for "padding" and "threshold". I'm assuming you saw this, but just in case you didn't?

Certainly not sure if that's what you're looking for, but might be, again, not to clear on the whole padding/threshold thing. You know my style anyway, love it as small and compact as it can go.

I think that habit derived from going years on a small 15" monitor that couldn't even pull out 1024x768 The smaller the better was my thing then, and still is now I guess. Habits are hard to break

i just started using bblean and i really like it. it's so fun to use, but i'm having trouble configuring it.

edit: nevermind, got it working. started from scratch. now i just have some little things.

e.g. why are my systray icons not colored?
how do i change the flashing color?
how can i right-click my task items to close them?
how do i get it to use my fonts?
how do i disable virtual desktops?

i also messed something up. i no longer have text on my task buttons. how do i fix this?

I need to get an updated version of BBLean, hopefully this all will work for yours.

SysTray icons:
If you are using BBtray - Ctrl-Right Click > Settings > Edit Settings > change "bbtray.icon.saturation" to 255 for full color, 0 for no color

Fonts:
Edit Extensions.rc > change "blackbox.global.fonts.enabled" to True
or
Edit the current style RC file

Virtual Desktops:
Edit Blackbox.rc > change "session.screen0.workspaces" to 1

Taskbar Text:
Ctrl-Right-click the Taskbar > Window > Tasks >
- Pick between "Text" "Icon Text" or "Icon"

thanks, sketching.

i figured out the tray icons thing (didn't see the hue/sat setting before), found the global fonts setting (didn't play with the extensions one before).

when i changed the virtual desktops setting before, i thought i hadn't disabled it because i would double-click on my toolbar and odd things would happen (like y'z dock would disappear, miranda would disappear) and seemingly cycle through. i'm still not sure what that was.

taskbar text is in window > configuration > tasks. that was bugging me. thanks for the help.

now to figure out how to get my desktop like in explorer (so i can copy and paste files to it, etc.). why you ask? i like to keep work on my desktop because it's easy to access. bbicons doesn't seem to do this.

and how do i get a nice-looking recycle bin? i tried bbbin, but it just has a box with "e" or "f" and apparently no setting for an icon.

so i solved most of my problems.

desktop: i just use the desktop in the main menu and double-click it to get into the desktop folder easily. it's not as accessible as the desktop in explorer, but it's not bad.

recycle bin: i decided to stop using recycle bin plugins altogether and just use bitbucket in the main menu. it's quick and easy.

systembarex: i also upgraded from bbleanbar to systembarex. it has some great features and is a big improvement over bbleanbar. if you're not already using it, i suggest getting it. and the great thing is, it just uses the same styles.

my only problem is that i lost the functionality of my gaming mouse (logitech mx510). i still have the back and forward buttons, but the one in the middle, right below the scroll wheel, doesn't work anymore. is it possible to configure it so that it minimizes all the windows?

edit: someone suggested this solution to me. in the logitech drivers, change the button command to send keystrokes, then configure the keystroke in bbkeys. works perfectly.

is there a windows shell replacement which gives me ability to use active desktop (html desktop) like in explorer.exe? just want to try it out. and if i like it maybe i switch....

ActiveDesktop _is_ explorer.exe, as far as I know. So, no Explorer, no ActiveDesktop. I am not familiar with any alternatives.

There's two alternatives that I know of.
Html Dock http://www.virtualplastic.net/msgboard/thread.php?forum=0&thread=903
And Webwidget http://www.lostinthebox.com/viewtopic.php?t=1582

Both worked fine for me. And used about the same amount of memory.

wow. i will check it out... thanx

I used to use different shells all the time. Litestep and Geoshell were my two favorites. I don't understand why people use *box shells in Windows as they really limit the functionality present with Explorer. I've used BlackBox and FluxBox on legacy machines running various flavors of Linux and even then, for what the machines did I don't even know why they couldn't just use xterm without a window manager. But thats neither here nor there. The only thing I can say is if you're going to switch shells try and pick one that keeps you in the 21st century.

Simple reason for why I use bblean.
All I want on my desktop is a clock.

Different people want different things.

I'm joining WinT's bbLean cheerleading squad with bbLean_mod.

If you feel like diving into XUL or playing with Gecko you could make your desktop an html page. I'd imagine mixing in that RunProtocol thing would help. Or you could try out "Robin."

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