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 [...]
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 23, 2008 – 4:36 am
Listen to this.
Launchpad bug 124326 requests a new titlebar button which minimises an application to the notification area rather than ordinary minimisation. Mostly this is currently done with the close button on the apps which support it, but some people feel it would be cleaner if these two functions were distinct. This [...]
November 2, 2008 – 6:30 pm
Window matching is the process of identifying a new window as one we’ve seen before. Of course every new window is new, and so we’ve never seen it before, but there’s an intuitive understanding that if you open a document in OpenOffice and then come back to it a week later that the window is [...]
August 15, 2008 – 11:54 am
Quite often people ask whether Metacity can talk to you across D-BUS, or something similar. It can’t. There is no need for this, because you can do pretty much anything you want using X messages. In particular, you can use messages from the EWMH specification to perform pretty much any task you might want, and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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