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 [...]
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 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 [...]
March 21, 2009 – 12:00 am
Metacity knows when a program is loaded, but hasn’t yet started, by using the startup notification specification. In GNOME bug 114384, the suggestion is raised that when Metacity opens a new program (say, from a keybinding) it should also tell itself that the program is loading in the same way.
This seems entirely reasonable.
Photo © [...]
Some of the enhancements which have been suggested need some sort of hint to be set on windows. For example, the recent squib about a special style for warning windows could only work if warning windows were marked in some way, and at present they’re not. Similarly, drag and drop can only work better [...]
March 16, 2009 – 12:00 am
GNOME bug 102548 suggests that warning dialogues should have a special frame style, and it’s suggested that this could look like safety tape wrapped around the edge.
This is not unlike the special frame style suggested here for root windows. However, while there’s already a way for the window manager to tell whether a window [...]
In GNOME bug 80984 (closely related to GNOME bug 76672), someone is asking for the window manager to help out with drag-and-drop. The problem is that a drag-and-drop operation should not raise the window it begins in, because raising that window could obscure the window you’re planning to drop the object into.
This is [...]
February 9, 2009 – 4:21 pm
At present the system menu, which you see when you right-click anywhere on the titlebar, left-click the menu button, or right-click an entry on the pager, is hard-coded separately into Metacity and libwnck, and required to be the same in both places.
I’ve been considering the idea of making it a property on the root window [...]
January 24, 2009 – 9:14 pm
GNOME bug 531512 suggests that Metacity should have a D-Bus interface. On the face of it, this is a good idea. However, the problem lies in the existing EWMH specification, which allows a program to request operations from a window manager– simply put, it’s pretty much exactly what a D-Bus interface would be, but [...]
December 29, 2008 – 6:52 pm
The speed Metacity renders decorations depends on the theme in use. If you want to time all the themes installed and view them, use:
for G in $(locate metacity-theme-1|grep /usr/share/themes|cut -d/ -f5); do metacity-theme-viewer $G; done
Mean client-side times on my system to draw each frame, in ascending order of speed:
Prelude (the theme given in the [...]
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