Category Archives: Tools

Further thoughts on extending the window menu

July 16, 2009 – 1:06 am

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 [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Thought experiments, nargery | Comments (7)

Squib of the day: keys for windows

March 8, 2009 – 12:00 am

GNOME bug 97725 raises the interesting idea of associating keys with windows.  Two differing approaches have been advocated:

Have a set of keys which work to “bookmark” windows, and a corresponding set of keys which mean “jump to bookmark n“.
Have a keystroke which means “bookmark this window using the key I’m about to press”, and [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Bug of the day, Switching | Comments (2)

Squib of the Day: Ctrl+Alt+Delete

March 5, 2009 – 12:00 am

GNOME bug 130632 raises the idea of being able to put up the GNOME system monitor with a keystroke bound by default to Ctrl+Alt+Delete, as on Windows, so that users can kill applications and so on.  The usability people say this is fine as long as the system monitor gains a prominent logout button.  [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Bug of the day | Comments (20)

Quick mention: a theme editor

February 23, 2009 – 12:20 pm

Someone is working on a Metacity theme editor called Metacity Themer. It appears to take rather a different approach from Opacity; it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. I’m not sure whether I should abandon Opacity; I wasn’t working on it anyway much (though I had thought about it quite a [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Themes, Uncategorized | Comments Off

another crazy idea

February 7, 2009 – 10:52 pm

Almost everything we bind keys to could be done with an external application via EWMH, and on my computer there’s no perceptible speed penalty.  (I’m sure there is on slower machines.)  Perhaps there should be a configure switch not to include the code to do everything except the things which pop up switchers (and another [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Switching, Thought experiments | Comments (3)

Squib of the day: walk through workspaces

February 7, 2009 – 9:55 pm

I don’t know why switching continues to be a source of squibs, but there it is.  In GNOME bug 570817 someone is suggesting a way to walk through workspaces (presumably only populated ones, but that’s not clear) in the same way that hitting and immediately releasing alt-tab moves you to the next window without [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Bug of the day, Switching | Comments (1)

Some of the tools

February 3, 2009 – 11:00 pm

Here are some of the tools that ship in the tools directory of Metacity:
announce-wrangler.py
is the script that produces release announcements in both text form (for gnome-announce-list) and HTML (for posts like this one).  It needs some polishing.
commit-wrangler.py
puts up an editor for a ChangeLog entry, then commits current changes.  It used to be far more complicated, [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Comments Off

You can switch in a direction!

January 30, 2009 – 1:17 am

When I posted yesterday’s squib, I really didn’t expect six people to say they’d use it. Someone plaintively left a message on the bug saying “Please make it possible for devilspie to add this feature!” Well, it is possible for devilspie or any other addon to add this feature, and for that reason [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Bugs and issues, How-to, Switching | Comments (1)

Half-finished code finishing marathon time

January 12, 2009 – 12:57 am

I have several half-finished bits of code lying around.  I think I’ll make an effort to merge them in, at least in test branches, to see what people think.  (When we get a DVCS, this will be easier.)

Veracity, a test suite.  This is about two-thirds done, but will require a bit of autotools magic to [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Also posted in Bugs and issues, Themes, Thought experiments | Comments (9)

Thought experiments: plugins

August 1, 2008 – 1:28 am

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 [...]

By Thomas Thurman | Comments (4)

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