MEGA SPEED!!!!!

 It's highly unlike me to post two articles in the same week (a habit that I've been trying to shake), but there's two posts today.
 I have just discovered the joy of BBLean.

 In the last post, I casually mentioned the Replacement for window's evil shell (explore.exe) called LightStep. It was nice - full featured, to say the least! It was far too bloated - there were far too many times that I had used over 100% of my CPU cycles. It did have a number of nice features, though, like an uber-quicklaunch popup bar - one that could parse !bang commands.
 In light of the terrible slowness of LightStep, and in incredible hatred of explorer (with it's never-ending memory consumption!), I looked for a simple window manager. One that would take care of all my window management needs without ANY kind of bloat (Having a Zip Archive extraction and compression tool in a window manager is NOT neccessary!). I looked for the MS Windows equivalent of Blackbox for the X Windowing System.
 Luckally for all of us, the nice fellows at bb4win had the courtesy to make BBLean (AKA BlackboxLean).

 Blackbox (and thus BBLean) has the wondrously simple interface that many early linux pioneers had gotten used to using. And why not? Blackbox is smaller, simpler, and faster then any window manager out there, then or now. And for those of you who can't stand minimalism, there's even a plug-in system.
 When Blackbox is first started, the only thing you will see is the (somewhat badly named) Slit - BB's equivalent of the taskbar, but much better. The Slit gives you access to your running programs, a different way to access the other desktops, your system trey, the date, and the time. All of this fits in a bar that doesn't even reach to either side of the screen. (Technically, the Slit is nothing, just a rectangular container. The functions are provided by special 'docklets.' That's not the official tern, but it's a good descriptive.)
 Blachbox has many of the features one would expect from a popular modern window manager - Features like Virtual Desktops (which are invaluable for people who 'multitask in bulk'), a CLI (BBLean just uses windows' "Run" command), a centralized list of major user programs (Such as solitaire and minesweeper), and a way to get help (Which, in the case of BB, is a guy online screaming "RTFM!" at you - it is, after all, an extremely simple system).

 It's really difficult to describe just how impossibly simple and easy it is to operate BBWM (The WM part of that means "Window Manager"). It's something that you can tell people, but they won't see why that's so great. Let's start at the menus.
 Pop-up Menus are the great helper/launcher/System tree explorer of Blackbox. Right-clicking anywhere on the root window (That's fancy XWS talk for background) will lead you to menus that will allow you to do virtually anything - Launch Programs, view your filesystem tree, change system settings, and change the style. The only things it can't do is switch desktops or find iconified windows. You use the middle mouse button for that.

 Another thing that's totally unexplainable is the unbridled speed. For some reason, it's totally faster then any other window manager out there (with the possible exceptions being UWM and XWM, and of course running in a pure terminal environment, but that means no graphics!) Perhaps it has something to do with the time-warping effect of really good gradient backgrounds... or not. Checking with the Windows Task Manager with BBLean, blackbox.exe takes about 2,077Kb of memory - somewhere between one third and one tenth of explore.exe's memory usage - and that doesn't even count any of it's usage of the Page File... (Removing most of Microsoft's junk would probibly free enough memory to be able to remove the pagefile - at least until I start a program).

 Well, that was my long-winded rant about Blackbox and BBLean. Thank you for not going insane.