We get letters: two projects

Nigel Tao writes:

Hello. I’ve been reading http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/ with great interest, and was wondering if you had any thoughts on my superswitcher program? People occasionally ask me if I’d push some of it upstream, which presumably means into metacity.

I asked which parts people wanted pushed upstream, and he said “the replacement of the existing alt-Tab behaviour”. I think this sort of behaviour replacement largely belongs in add-in programs like superswitcher and Devil’s Pie, for example, where they just use the EWMH to take over part of Metacity’s functionality, Metacity stays out of the way, and it makes Metacity a little bit simpler.

I think we should probably have some central place, maybe on live.gnome.org, where we list add-in programs such as these. Your thoughts, gentle readers?

(Nigel also raises the question of whether ctrl-alt-left from workspace 1 should switch to workplace n, which I think has been raised before, but I can’t find a record of. Update: GNOME bug 89315 and about a million dupes.)

Meanwhile, gandalfn writes:

Hello,

I see recently that Iain work to integrate compositing in metacity. I’ll also work on composite manager (outside metacity) which use cairo for rendering. I have implemented it outside metacity to preserve his
functionalities. My principal goal was to provide compositing in GNOME and on all platform. For that, CCM used cairo and his backends to render (Xrender/Glitz).

What about joining our efforts to provide compositing on GNOME ?

CCM is using GObject for object model design and provides a plugin system which can be used to add various effects. In the future, I’m planning to add a clutter backend, some means for other applications to interact with cairo-compmgr (especially accessibility applications), some cool plugins, etc.

Iain, and everyone else, what do you think? For myself, I think gandalfn’s compositor looks to be both more complicated (with a plugin system) and less finished than Iain’s, but as it grows we’ll see how it looks; even if/when Iain’s compositor is a standard shipping part of Metacity, it’ll be possible to turn it off and use another one, in the same way that Nigel’s been doing with superswitcher. Then if other compositors come along in the spirit of Metacity with good ideas, it’ll be possible to switch parts around and so on.

All email quoted by permission. Image: Stamp FR 387, Postverk Føroya; released to public domain.