«
»

Help Me To Do l337 Tricks

Here’s the idea:


and

So what was those friggin’ cool mockups about? Well this has been bugging for years now. I usually have a lot of terminals and nautilus windows around. A lot. I really want to be able to use the most of my screen and also be able to use most of my windows without jumping through hoops. There are two things I think about almost every day that would make my every day computing easier.

Window Explosion

In lack of a better word :-) See the top most example. The idea is this:

  • Expand in all directions without creating new overlapping windows

I usually want to do this with my terminals and Nautilus windows. RIght now I use Metacity’s vertical- and horizontal maximization like crazy.

Window Tiling

This is not a new concept and it should be pretty obvious from the second illustration what I mean. The tiling would have to be semi fuzzy to “Do What I Want” (TM), but that should not be a problem.

The Solution

In short: Super small apps using libwnck bound to metacity’s keyboard shortcuts. Should not be that hard with libwnck’s set_geometry method now should it? Or should it?

The Problem
I’ve been banging my head against the wall on a Metacity bug that makes libwnck’s set_geometry not work. See bug 448183 – Changing position of a window by sending _NET_MOVERESIZE_WINDOW does not work.
If somebody can help me get a fix in Metacity trunk (any tip from small hint to complete patch is welcome), then I shall do my very best to make the above (very stylish) mockups reality.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 17:12 and is filed under Gnome, Hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Help Me To Do l337 Tricks”

  1. Thomas Thurman Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 08:46

    The move-and-resize thing is a long-standing bug, so thanks for dealing with it. The patch you supply does actually look like a reasonable attempt at a solution, but I haven’t tried it. I will try it and apply it if it improves matters. Sorry that this is messing you around.

  2. S.F. Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 09:23

    ion allows you to do the tiling part. Unfortunately it’s a complete window manager that is centered around that idea, so it’s maybe a bit of too much.

  3. Ketil Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 12:12

    Not sure I understand correctly, but you might want to check out the Compiz Fusion plugin Maximumize, which is beind developed.

  4. Ryan Paul Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 01:18

    Sawfish actually has a feature like what you describe as window explosion. It’s kind of ironic that the same thing is so much trouble to implement for Metacity. I’d definitely like to see this feature supported too. I also miss a few other features from Sawfish, like window packing and directional focus changing.

  5. tyler Says:
    February 21st, 2008 at 14:24

    YEA !!!!

    Please god. I can finally let go of WMII….

Leave a Reply