metacity

Here are four pieces of news from the world of theming. Human may be replaced. We don’t usually cover news about specific themes here (although perhaps we should) but it’s worth noting that Ubuntu’s default theme, Human, although very beautiful, is a little long in the tooth.  There has been a proposal to replace it in [...]

At the moment, when you press alt-Tab, you cycle through a list of windows on the current workspace.  People use workspaces in many ways, though; some people keep only one application maximised on each workspace.  Very many people have asked for the ability to alt-Tab between windows on all workspaces, not just the current one. There [...]

In the comments to a previous post, we were asked about implementing tabs in the window manager.  Calum pointed out that the HIG recommends against applications adding their own document-level tabs on the grounds that this is a job for the window manager.  Yet the window manager has never risen to the challenge, and very [...]

There has been some discussion on the last post about implementing functionality similar to Microsoft’s “Aero Snap”.  Your chronicler has never used Windows 7, but the idea is demonstrated in this video.  It appears to mean that: when a window is dragged to the left or right of the screen, it is vertically maximised, and [...]

In GNOME bug 517722, a new keybinding is suggested which will make the focussed window take up as much space as possible without covering any other window.  If applied to all windows, it would make Metacity behave like a tiling window manager. The main problem with this idea is the same one we were discussing [...]

At present, the width of a window’s border is decided by the current theme.  However, some people find it harder either to see thin borders or to click on them.  They would prefer thicker borders than most people want. In addition, Metacity measures border widths in pixels.  The higher the resolution of a display, the thinner [...]

Thomas has been working on Metacity this past week, supported by Collabora Ltd.  Thanks, everyone! A. Last week. Work on Metacity has fallen into three parts over the last week: A1. Routine work such as reviewing patches. This included GNOME bug ... [More] 598231 (null dereference in visual bell). GNOME bug 336750 (potential DoS on shift-printscreen).  This patch looked [...] [Less]

D-Bus is the standard way for applications to communicate with one another.  But the EWMH, supplemented for our purposes by libwnck, is the standard way for applications to communicate with the window manager .  GNOME bug 531512 raises the suggestion that even window manager communication should be done over D-Bus, or at least that D-Bus [...]

Future directions. Here’s where Cowbell is going next: The existing functionality is going to be moved into a library called libcowbell.  Very little will be changed at this point from what we already have.  (But there will be some extra tests.) A release of the metacity-cowbell branch will be made that can use libcowbell. A release of [...]

I believe the best direction in the immediate future for Cowbell is as follows: Fix the :hover and :active pseudoclasses. Add support for v2 themes back in. Provide a patch for Mutter. Port some more themes, such as Crux. Anyone wishing to advocate ... [More] for anything else on the future directions list to come sooner is welcome to make their point, [...] [Less]