Bruce van der Kooij » window management

Fixing the IndustrialTango theme

Bruce van der Kooij — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:57:02 +0000

I’ve been using IndustrialTango for years now and am stuck in my ways. Now that I’ve switched from Metacity to Compiz an ugly issue with Industrial Tango’s window border theme reared its head, for every window the window icon on the top left would not display. Instead of switching to a different window border theme (IndustrialTango seems to be the only one with this issue) I decided to hunt down what was causing the issue.

After a lot of work figuring out how to test a theme and comparing the theme with Human I finally figured it out:

--- /home/bruce/Desktop/metacity-theme-1.xml.backup	2009-06-09 13:59:07.000000000 +0200
+++ /usr/share/themes/IndustrialTango/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml	2009-06-09 15:16:41.000000000 +0200
@@ -478,15 +478,15 @@
 
 
  
-  
-         y="0"
-         width="width" height="height"/>
+  
+         y="2"
+         width="mini_icon_width" height="mini_icon_height"/>
 
 
  
-  
-         y="0"
-         width="width" height="height" alpha="0.5"/>
+  
+         y="2"
+         width="mini_icon_width" height="mini_icon_height" alpha="0.5"/>

If you ever have to work on a window border theme, here’s some information that might help you. The tutorial Designing Metacity Themes had a very helpful suggestion to use metacity-theme-viewer to test a theme and the window border dialog in System -> Preferences -> Appearance makes it quite easy to switch between themes.

Improving GNOME Do’s Window Manager plugin

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:38:37 +0000

Something related to the previous post and something that I think would be quite useful is if GNOME Do’s Window Manager plugin by Jason Smith supported textually searching through the window titles and then focusing the application it found. It currently only supports searching for application names. Using libwnck this is actually quite easy. Focus prevention logic in the window manager may prevent proper focusing though. Perhaps ideally it would be able to search through the entire window content, but AFAIK this cannot be easily achieved. This is actually something I’ve been meaning to implement, let’s see if I get around to it.

Useful window management functionality

Bruce van der Kooij — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 01:38:31 +0000

Ater some experimenting I’ve switched from Metacity to Compiz, even though it’s a little bit slower on my system. I’ve disabled all animations and whatnot as I don’t care for that, but what drew me was the potential usefulness of certain plugins for window management. I’m currently trying to get used to a particular combination of two plugins, the Application Switcher and the Shift Switcher.

I use the Application Switcher () for quickly switching between known applications (mostly back and forth), while I use the Shift Switcher () to actually search open windows. To increase the usefulness of these plugins I limit all animations and raise the relevant speed sliders to the maximum allowed value. To limit the amount of distraction I also change some default options for both these plugins. For the Application Switcher I turn off the Bring To Front functionality and for the Shift Switcher I change the appearance to Flip and the Angle to 0 so everything lines up.

The Shift Switcher

I’m also keeping my eye on some of the other plugins. While I do organize things using virtual desktops, perhaps I don’t utilize them as much as I thought I did because I haven’t yet used the Expose plugin. The Group and Tab Windows plugin is also seems quite useful, but I haven’t managed to get the hang of it yet.

I’m certainly hoping for more innovation in the window manager area but I have to say that I’m not looking forward to GNOME Shell (see the GNOME 3.0 release plan). I haven’t yet managed to compile it yet so I’ll reserve further comments for a later time. If you’re interested in window managers though there are some real gems [of blog posts] to be found in the Metacity team blog … for the adult in you.