Blackbox has specific design goals, and some functionality is provided only through other applications. One example is the bbkeys hotkey application.
Blackbox is written in C++[4][7] and contains completely original code.[8] It was created by Bradley T. Hughes[1] and is available under the MIT License. Blackbox has compliance with the Extended Window Manager Hints specification.[9]
The original author seems to have ceased updating the repository with the exception of a minor fix of compilation problems in 2015,[10] leaving the last original version at 0.70.1. However an actively maintained fork by Brian Bidulock has been picked up by several Linux distributions in its place,[11][12][13] and it is featured in pkgsrc.[14] Despite that, some other Linux distributions still use the original source code,[15][16] as does FreeBSD.[17]