meta_warning() and dialogue boxes

meta_warning exampleI didn’t expect to get useful suggestions from the Linux Haters’ blogs, but here’s something that might fly: they point out that warnings from the window manager end up in .xsession-errors where nobody ever sees them. But now that we’re using Zenity for dialogues throughout, there’s no reason why we can’t adapt meta_warning() to put up a dialogue every time a warning is issued, which might alert users to useful things, such as why they can’t bind the keystroke they want.  Having a way to turn this off might also be helpful.

This entry was written by Thomas Thurman, posted on February 28, 2009 at 7:16 pm, filed under Letters, Thought experiments. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Comments

  1. Screwtape
    Posted March 1, 2009 at 12:38 am | Permalink

    You’d want to be very (very) careful about what warnings you turn into user-visible alerts, though. The warning you’ve pictured is useful, but currenty my .xsession-errors has things like “Buggy client sent a _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW message with a timestamp of 0 for 0x44000e5 (Toolbox)” and “Attempt to perform window operation 20 on window none when operation 20 on none already in effect”, neither of which are particularly helpful to me, and would certainly be annoying if they popped up as modal dialog boxes.

    Is there some way within Metacity to alter keybindings, or does that warning appear when Metacity notices a gconf update that it can’t honour?

  2. Nobody sees that?
    Posted March 4, 2009 at 4:27 pm | Permalink

    In the screenshot:
    What’s the point of listing “run_command_screenshot” twice and not pointing which command already uses Tab? :/