Author Archives: Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

Two hundred

The Metacity blog has been going now for a little over two years, and this is our two hundredth post. We began at least partly as a place to keep an essay about building the tab list, and we grew from there, picking up the Metacity Journal, release notes, and the Bug of the [...]

Copper: an experiment with CSS

Further to our previous discussion of CSS, Thomas spent a few hours on sketching out a possible design for a CSS-based theme format, and on representing Daniel Borgmann’s Human theme using it. This is an experiment, all very blue-sky and unofficial, and is quite likely never to lead anywhere.
The first question to resolve is [...]

The window menu

The window menu is the menu you see when you click the menu button (which usually has the window icon on it), or right-click the titlebar. An identical menu appears when you right-click an application’s entry in the task switcher on the panel, although this menu is owned by libwnck rather than Metacity and [...]

Towards a third version of the theme format: some design goals

When we add features to the theme format, they must be added all in one go for reasons which were explained earlier. We are currently on version 2 of the theme format. In case there is ever a version 3, here are some of our design goals.  Not all of these may necessarily [...]

Window matching experiment

At the Collabora party, Robert Ancell asked me how difficult it would be to implement window matching in Metacity. I decided this was an interesting question and spent an hour and a half today working on it. The results are now in the matching branch in GNOME git. If you’d like to [...]

Notes from Gran Canaria

Lots of happy buzz about window managers here at the desktop summit.  Some things people have said:

Someone asked about implementing window matching.  It’s always been our policy that it should be done with an external tool, but policies can of course be rethought.  We might implement it in a branch and see whether anyone likes [...]

Recent Mutter and Metacity activity

Here’s a quick roundup of recent happenings with Mutter and Metacity.

Sugar Labs want to use Metacity (and not Mutter) in Sugar, and ran into the problem that undecorated maximised windows are necessarily fullscreened.  A patch was provided to turn this off.
Two on tabs:

Sam H wants to integrate tabs into Mutter;
Ivan Denker wants to know whether [...]

Vectacity as CSS

Davyd Madeley made an interesting suggestion for redesigning the theme format.  Assuming, as seems likely, we end up using Clutter, there’s no need to specify the structure of a window, which would need SVG.  After all, all windows have a basically similar structure.  Instead, we could style any item on the window usinga CSS file, [...]

The future of…

The future of the project: It’s fairly clear now that Mutter will be an alternative window manager in GNOME 2.28, and the only window manager in GNOME 3.  It is therefore taking over the reins from Metacity 2: effectively, Mutter is Metacity 3.
But what is to happen to Metacity 2?  Your chronicler believes that the [...]

Squib of the day: read your email

Metacity’s window menu is less than cluttered; there’s room for a fair amount of extra options in there. One that was recently suggested is an option to take a screenshot of the current window.  However, that can be done already using keybindings.  What about more adventurous use of the menus?
GNOME bug 472370 makes [...]

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