metacity

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 [...]

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 [...]

Four points of note in theming today.  Your thoughts on these, gentle reader, are appreciated. Screwtape has been working on a Metacity theme to look like Mac OS Classic.  The resulting list of tips and tricks for writing Metacity themes ought to be required reading for all themers.  Screwtape, would you mind if we linked to [...]

I mentioned a while back that Human is the slowest of all common themes, taking 6ms to draw the average frame.  It occurred to me to wonder why this might be, of course, so I took the opportunity to instrument it.  Here are the results.  The height of the diagram spans six milliseconds.  You will [...]

Not very surprisingly, replacing horizontal and vertical lines with rectangles doesn’t speed things up detectably.  (There once were systems where this made a difference, but I think GTK is probably clever enough that this doesn’t matter.) More ... [More] interestingly, plotting the title to a monochrome bitmap, and then setting that bitmap as a stipple and drawing a [...] [Less]

For once, this isn’t about an existing bug– well, there’s a tenuous connection to GNOME bug 311428. Several of the recent squibs have resulted in the observation that an external script could be made to do the work.  This is true for responding to keypresses, but for problems such as performing some action whenever a [...]

Several ideas have come up recently about extensions to the theme format.  Here are some rather disjointed notes about the problems we face here.  I apologise for their fragmentary nature. According to policy, incompatible changes must be made all at ... [More] once with a new version of the theme format, to preserve backward compatibility.  (This has only [...] [Less]

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. ... [More] commit-wrangler.py puts up an editor for a ChangeLog entry, then commits current changes.  It used to be far more complicated, [...] [Less]

In GNOME bug 570079, someone suggests throwing away alt-tab entirely to replace it with an external program, specifically superswitcher. Of course, you can already do this by disabling the ordinary alt-tab action and then assigning superswitcher to be one of the custom commands, but I think they want it shipped that way by default. [...]

It’s that journal thing again. Bugs They just keep piling up, don’t they? GNOME bug 163023 - claimed no longer relevant GNOME bug 310842 - prefixes, squib from a few days back: what’s the use case? GNOME bug 339692 - possible patch; compiz doesn’t like it GNOME bug 387139 - possibly actually a gedit issue GNOME bug [...]