Author Archives: Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

Thought experiments: plugins

Recently, Markus Weißbacher raised GNOME bug 545627 to ask for a new menu option which suspended a window’s owning process. Now, it’s not particularly difficult to do this, and to some people (presumably Markus, at least) it’s useful, but there are hundreds of things we could put on the window menu, and if […]

Compositor command-line switches

It seems, from reading blogs and forums, that many people like the idea of using Metacity’s compositor but are scared of changing the deep magic of gconf. In addition, there is nothing in the “–help” text to show that we have a compositor at all. Therefore, I propose a new switch to override […]

How to get backtraces from a window manager

This may sound obvious, but I only just thought of it.
Suppose you make a change to Metacity which causes it to segfault on startup. What you’d ordinarily do is to load it into gdb and have a look at what’s going on in the backtrace with the bt command. But you can’t do […]

If the user will not come to the window, the window shall come to the user

Suppose you have two workspaces, and a window on each one. You’re looking at window A, so clearly window B is offscreen. You click something on window A, and window A attempts to present window B to you. What does that mean?
Let’s have two concrete examples:

0×01: You’ve clicked a link in Pidgin’s buddy […]

2.23.55 released

Thanks to Elijah Newren and Thomas Thurman for improvements in this version.
Contrary to rumour, this release does not add tabbing to everything.

Display theme name in title bar of theme viewer (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 430198)
Allow toggling of non-compositor effects (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 92867)
Add some extra null checks (Thomas ) (GNOME bug 422242)
Check for double-freeing […]

2.23.34 out (mainly for the release day)

2.23.34
=======
Thanks to Thomas Thurman for improvements in this version.
- Commenting and tidying (Thomas)
- Fix possible compositor crash (Thomas) (#530702)
Translations
Khaled Hosny (ar), Yavor Doganov (bg), Jorge González (es), Kjartan Maraas (nb),
Yannig Marchegay (Kokoyaya) (oc), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Clytie
Siddall (vi)

The overview series: Drag and drop. You complain, we explain.

If there are two overlapping windows on the screen, people would like to be able to pick up an object from the lower window and drag it to the upper without bringing the lower window to the front, because if that happens the lower window will obscure the upper, and you won’t have anywhere to […]

Justifying window titles

It was said that Metacity doesn’t let you decide whether titles of windows are left-justified (as in modern versions of MS Windows) or centre-justified (as on the Mac). But actually, it’s a theme issue to decide how a title is drawn. Here’s how to change your theme from centre-justified to left-justified.
First, find out […]

Understanding Metacity themes

This is an article about how to theme Metacity. It is a work in progress, and I have had to dig deeply to find some answers; I may well have made mistakes and I welcome corrections and suggestions.
GNOME lets you theme a bunch of different things, but we’re only talking about window border themes […]

2.23.21

What is it ?
============
Metacity is a simple compositing window manager that integrates nicely with GNOME 2.
What’s changed ?
================
Thanks to Robert Escriva, Iain Holmes, Matt Krai, Thomas Thurman, and Chris Wang for improvements in this version.
- Add shadow ability for menus and tooltips (Iain) (#517442 ) (GNOME bug 517524)
- Fix possible crashes […]

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported