Category Archives: Metacity Labs

Wild ideas.

Future directions of Cowbell

Future directions. Here’s where Cowbell is going next:

The existing functionality is going to be moved into a library called libcowbell.  Very little will be changed at this point from what we already have.  (But there will be some extra tests.)
A release of the metacity-cowbell branch will be made that can use libcowbell.
A release of [...]

Apologia for CSS

This blog is not about to become devoted to the single topic of experimental CSS theming, but some interesting points were raised in the discussion yesterday, which spilled over to Slashdot.  We should have emphasised the experimental nature of the CSS subsystem in its name: perhaps “CSS On Window Borders Experimental Layout Language”.
Why? Some people [...]

More CSS thoughts

The recent discussion about CSS themes looks as though it may become one of the most interesting new ideas in theming in recent years. Here are some further thoughts on what may evolve from this.
An alternative. There is no general way, and few special ways, to convert expression-based v1 and v2 themes to the [...]

Further thoughts on extending the window menu

The previous post about extending the window menu caused a great deal of discussion. It would seem that our readers would be interested in an implementation.  Thomas is considering working on this after the window matching experiments are more stable.
Now, we can imagine that any package might want to add menu options when it [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

Squib of the day: SVG theme support

GNOME bug 107012 brings up the perennial question of SVG support in themes, otherwise known as Vectacity. We’ve already covered this in a few places, but I think it may be worth mentioning here the two main reasons SVG-based themes is a good thing (there may be any number of other reasons they’re a [...]

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