Metacity Annoyances

The standard Linux desktop at work is now Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, so I upgraded from my heavily customized Fedora Core 2 setup last week.

Since sawfish isn’t part of the “official” setup, I’ve been trying to get used to Metacity, the underlying GNOME desktop window manager.

One of the first annoyances I encountered was that I couldn’t easily align windows since edge gravity isn’t the default. Reading throught the doc files in the metacity RPM revealed that pressing the shift key while moving a window will turn on edge gravity.

I’d really like to have edge gravity be the default and have the shift key turn off edge gravity, but I guess it will have to do.

Another annoyance is that I can’t seem to find any way to change the mouse bindings on the window manager. I’d like to emulate the maximize, maximize-vertical, and maximize-horizontal behavior of the titlebar maximize button in sawfish, but I can only find out how to do key bindings for those functions, not mouse buttons.

If anyone knows how to work around these annoyances, drop me an email, the address is over on the right.

Wednesday March 30, 2005   ·   Permalink