Metacity hacks

I've been using Enlightenment 17 as a window manager, but decided to go back to GNOME/Metacity since they're more polished. Overall a good move.

There are three issues I have with GNOME/Metacity. The first, and least solvable, is resources: GNOME is not lightweight. But I have sufficient RAM to ignore that issue for the most part.

The second problem is switching workspaces. In Enlightenment, going left from the leftmost workspace yields the rightmost workspace. Similarly for the rest of the directions. This is not the case for Metacity; you cannot go left from the leftmost workspace, or right from the rightmost.

Lastly, window placement. ANYTHING would be better than Metacity's policy, which is tiling all new windows from the top left. Open up four terminals on an empty workspace, you get what looks like one terminal with four titlebars, plus a lot of empty screen.

workspace_switch.py has sane workspace switching behavior. You can map Ctrl+Alt+Right and Ctr+Alt+Left to custom commands using gconf-editor (/apps/metacity/global_keybindings and /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands). Check workspace_switch.py --help for details.

I had to modify metacity to get reasonable behavior for its window locations -- metacity is renouned for its lack of configuration options.

In the metacity sources, go to src/core/place.c. Nuke all existing functions and add the following:

void
meta_window_place (MetaWindow        *window,
                MetaFrameGeometry *fgeom,
                int                x,
                int                y,
                int               *new_x,
                int               *new_y)
{
 MetaRectangle work_area;
 const MetaXineramaScreenInfo* xinerama =
    meta_screen_get_current_xinerama (
       window->screen);
 meta_window_get_work_area_for_xinerama (window,
    xinerama->number, &work_area);
 int xrange = work_area.width - x;
 int yrange = work_area.height - y;
 *new_x = (rand() % xrange);
 *new_y = (rand() % yrange);
}

As you can see, this positions the new window at some random location, ensuring that no portion of the window is off the screen (unless perhaps the window is larger than the screen).

Perhaps I'll work on this -- certain things that would ideally be centered or center-parent are positioned randomly, such as the GNOME run dialog or modal dialogs. But for now, it's a huge improvement.