GNOME and the way forward [LWN.net]

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 2:12 UTC (Thu) by newren (subscriber, #5160)
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

Your editor is burned daily by the metacity "a new window gets the keyboard focus regardless of the pointer position" policy; having the focus yanked away in the middle of a sentence does not seem like the most user-friendly policy.

What version of Metacity are you running? That shouldn't happen any more with focus stealing prevention. If you're using a recent version it sounds like you found a bug; if so, I'd love to see a bug report if you have the time. Further, your comment about "regardless of pointer position" is puzzling. If the window happens to appear where your current one is, you don't care if the window takes focus away while you're in the middle of typing a sentence? Sounds strange to me. ;-)

Clicking on a window does not mean the window should be raised; there is a separate combination for that.

I have a patch if you want it. It also turns out that this specific preference has been patched in by RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, XD2, SUSE, Novell, and perhaps others though I haven't checked (however, all of them have botched the patch to varying degress); I intend to propose the patch for the 2.13 development cycle predominantly on this basis (I only found out about XD2, SUSE, and Novell doing recently when Federico hunted me down to ask some questions about it, so it's too late for 2.12).

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GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 2:42 UTC (Thu) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

Most people's complaints seem to center around bad window management. It's now wonder why:
X11 window managers have always been vastly better than Mac and Windows equivalents. I'll give
you an example: on a Mac you have to grab the title bar to move a window, and you have to grab a
tiny corner of the window to resize it. On Windows the same is true, but the tiny corner is even
smaller. On XFWM4 (as only one example), you simply tap the Alt key *anywhere in the window* to
move (primary click) or resize (secondary click). You can raise and lower a window similarly, which
in the other operating systems requires another attempt to hit the title bar.

XFWM4's behavior is the ultimate expression of Fitts' Law. The window itself is a huge target, so
why not use the entire area for move and resize commands? And I think when people see these
changes in Gnome they think X11 is reverting back to the terrible Windows and MacOS behavior. In
other words, they see changes that make Gnome more Windows-like or more Mac-like as being a
severe inconvenience.

Luckily those of use in the know can just use XFCE :)

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 3:15 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Metacity seems to have similar behaviour: alt + left button moves, alt + middle button resizes and alt + right button shows the WM menu for the window.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 3:33 UTC (Thu) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

I wasn't trying to pick on Metacity, I only use XFWM4 as an example because that's my favorite. I think Metacity is also a fine WM. My only point was that, in GNOME development, simplification frequently means removing some feature that some users have been using for a decade. Hence I can understand the whining.

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 21, 2005 8:05 UTC (Sun) by amikins (subscriber, #451) [Link]

That's pretty much been my experience with Gnome since 2.0 started.
The simplest thing I miss dearly and am no longer sure how to accomplish in any window manager is a floating toolbar at the very top of the screen not aligned with the center or right edge that does not displace windows (i.e. cut into screen real estate).
I preferred to place my clock and a few other system monitoring tools in a spot where they would overlap with the titlebar of a maximized application, and they quite happily fit there without interfering with anything else.
Early on in the gnome 2 cycle this started becoming an obscure option that had to be enabled to keep the 'smart' behavior from fighting me.
Later on, the option disappeared from easy location; it wasn't until well after I threw my hands up at Gnome in general (for other reasons as well) that I learned that the 'power' configuration was hidden away in a place that was totally unobvious.
The last time I used Gnome (Which was admittedly about a year ago) I couldn't figure out how to regain that behavior.. The changlog insisted no behavior was lost, and my attempt to clarify my problem to a developer at that point in time (I can't recall to whom I was speaking) basically gave the impression that there was nothing lost, and if there was, I wasn't doing anything worthwhile anyway.

I'm also curious.. Did Metacity ever develop the 'viewport' functionality that Sawfish/Sawmill had? I personally find the 'multiple desktops' functionality counter-intuitive, and miss the ability to slide a viewport around a larger effective desktop.