I’d have thought it would be possible to add a window-state to the theme in such a way that older versions of Metacity could still read it, but I don’t know how strict they are about ignoring things they don’t understand.

@Gustavo Noronha:
When I suggested a themeable alternate window state, I was thinking of a Macintosh screenshot I saw once, with a dialog-box whose title-bar was covered in black-and-yellow warning-stripes; I think that would be visually-catching enough. :)

You’re right that Nautilus would be a more useful example; I used xterm because it’s clear that it’s working because there’s already some sign that it’s running as root, though. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to tell from internal evidence that the patch worked.

A more useful example would perhaps be Nautilus windows – if one of those is running as root, I’d *really* love to have some outward sign of it.

Alternative themes would be a bit of an upheaval and probably not as useful as your idea about window states, which I like. We’d presumably stick with the dichotomy of root/any-other-user, and not have a theme for running as various other non-root users.

The “(as superuser)”/”(as root)” part can be checked in now, though, whereas a change to the theme will result in pushing us up to theme format v3, so we’d want to do all such things in a separate branch and merge them to trunk all together. That’s no reason not to do it, of course…

I thought about having an extra hint to allow non-root apps to use the alternate theme if they were potentially destructive without requiring root access, but I can’t actually think of any such activities.