Welcome back, gentle reader, to the Metacity Journal, which now talks to you over your cornflakes. This may not be a long-term feature, but your chronicler thought it worth trying.
It’s been a quiet few days in the world of Metacity, but here’s the latest news. As ever, feel free to dive in on any of the bugs mentioned.
The recent post about why window matching is currently impossible brings up a chicken-and-egg question. The window manager doesn’t do window matching because it’s nearly impossible, since windows don’t identify themselves, but windows don’t identify themselves because there’s no need, since the window manager doesn’t support it. Perhaps adding window matching as an experimental option would help persuade people to add the GTK call to enable window matching in their programs. Meanwhile, Thomas has suggested making these changes as a new GNOME Goal.
There has been some offlist discussion about reviving Vectacity, the SVG-based branch. This would make theme editing a fair amount simpler.
Recent bugs
- GNOME bug 560142: AisleRiot and Metacity arguing over fullscreen mode.
- GNOME bug 533277: session restoration problems
- GNOME bug 524468: problem with the screenshot button reported; Thomas cannot reproduce it
- GNOME bug 487356: there are focus issues if a buried window is fullscreen. This is quite important to fix and is currently at the top of the hitlist.
Around the blogs
- techrepublic says you shouldn’t overlook Metacity, but unaccountably believes that it was only briefly the GNOME window manager.
- wenlong finds Metacity is a useful window manager for use with Avant Window Navigator.
And that’s all until next time.
Vectacity sounds great, if I’m honest I think GTK should be resolution independent by going the vector route and if metacity leads the way then I’m all for it.
RE: Window matching – I did see the long list of apps with unique IDs etc, but surely sloppy window matching is better than none? I’ve seen a lot of people with dedicated desktops for certain ‘roles’ such as messaging/email – web – development – music and these all require a unique set of applications. Using KWin it’s trivial to just ‘sticky’ to a certain desktop and when closer/reopened will open where requested. I think that’s the only thing that metacity misses out on at the moment for usability – stickiness/state.
If you put it in and people use it, great. If not, hey you’ve done your part. People can patch any offending apps or you can sloppily match for those cases.