Most themes place the icon of the current application somewhere on the titlebar. Some operating systems (notably OS X) allow you to drag this icon as if it was the very file which is being viewed in that window. This behaviour has been suggested for Metacity in the past. One of the two main problems [...]
January 16, 2010 – 3:25 am
D-Bus is the standard way for applications to communicate with one another. But the EWMH, supplemented for our purposes by libwnck, is the standard way for applications to communicate with the window manager . GNOME bug 531512 raises the suggestion that even window manager communication should be done over D-Bus, or at least that D-Bus [...]
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 is [...]
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 if [...]
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 a [...]
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 [...]
syndicate