March 2009 – Page 4 – …for the adult in you

Squib of the day: allow binding naked modifiers

GNOME bug 150897 points out that as things stand you can’t bind naked modifiers to actions– for example, you can’t have it so that pressing alt on its own takes a screenshot.

The reason this might be useful is that pressing super (which is generally the key with the Windows logo on it) on its own brings up the main menu in Windows, and it would be nice to allow it to do so in GNOME as well.

Of course it could also be done by making the key not be a modifier, but then you would lose the ability to make super-M or whatever do something.

Your chronicler can foresee having to switch away from their trusty IBM Model M to test this one.

Photo © frohner-1, cc-by.

Squib of the Day: Show size during resizing

GNOME bug 130821 suggests that all windows should have the current dimensions shown in the middle while they’re being resized. Everyone seems to agree this is a good idea, and I’m not sure why we haven’t just committed it yet. Any naysayers?

Photo © Bruno Peck, cc-by-nc-sa.

Administrivia

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Policy about theme versions

Metacity has a policy about enhancements which require changes to the theme format. Metacity has to be both backwards and forward compatible. In other words, it’s not enough that a later version of Metacity can run with themes intended for an earlier version. Earlier versions must also be able to run with themes intended for a later version.

In order to accomplish this goal, themes are kept in a file named metacity-theme-n.xml, where n is the number of the version of the theme format. A theme which supports a version should also have files for all the preceding versions, and Metacity will read only the highest version found which it can understand and leave the rest alone.

This works. However, if there were hundreds of theme versions, it would become unwieldy. So we save up enhancements and commit a bunch of them all together. The only time this has happened so far was in October 2006, when v2 was introduced. (Not many people are using v2, even over three years later, and even though users evidently want the features it brings. This may be because theme artists aren’t sure how to create them. One of the advantages of a theme editor would be that it would be able to take care of creating valid intermediate versions for you.)

Some enhancements still being suggested will involve changes to the theme format. For example, Screwtape has suggested a special window state representing windows which are running as root, so that they can be drawn using a different colour or something. Enhancements such as these will all have to be made on a branch and merged all together at some time in the medium future, perhaps next year. I have made a category to group posts about such enhancement requests into.

One of the big questions about v3 is whether it should be SVG-based– the so-called Vectacity format. This will quite possibly win us very little for the extra effort that will be required to mould SVG into a format which can adequately represent window decorations, so Vectacity may not happen in version 3, or at all.

Photo © Tim McFarlane, cc-by-nc-nd.

Squib of the Day: Ctrl+Alt+Delete

GNOME bug 130632 raises the idea of being able to put up the GNOME system monitor with a keystroke bound by default to Ctrl+Alt+Delete, as on Windows, so that users can kill applications and so on. The usability people say this is fine as long as the system monitor gains a prominent logout button. This has been raised against the system monitor as GNOME bug 143235. Perhaps, gentle reader, we should add the keystroke anyway and not wait indefinitely for the system monitor maintainers to add the button.

Update: GNOME bug 99335 is also asking for a keybinding to log out, and someone has suggested Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Perhaps the two could be fixed at a stroke.

Update: GNOME bug 131617 is asking for a keybinding to xkill or its equivalent in the panel, which could also be fixed by having a keybinding like the one discussed above.

Squib of the day: “(as root)”

GNOME bug 549389, which has a couple of duplicates, says that if a window is owned by an app which is running as a user other than the user who’s running Metacity, then it should have “(as fred)” on the titlebars, just as it would have “(on chiark)” or whatever if you were running the app remotely. The obvious very useful case here is to have “(as root)” when you’re running a program as root, to remind you to be careful.

The code to do this exists in Bugzilla now, so we can check it into trunk at any point.

Other suggestions, some better than others, have included:

Use an alternative theme for root windows
Draw a red border around the window
Use a label (a space as big as the titlebar immediately below it) saying “Root process”
Say “(as superuser)” instead of “(as root)” in case users don’t know what “root” means
Have a hint not to write the username in the titlebar so that apps which generally run as root, like the package manager, don’t have baffling information all over their titlebar.