Not losing this again: Metacity workspace loop.

[elfs]

For reasons I won’t go into, I’ve had to re-activate my “professional” login on my laptop.  In order to distinguish it from the Elf user, which uses Enlightenment, I use Gnome when at the office.  And one thing I absolutely loathe about Metacity, the Gnome window manager, is that when you’re flipping between workspaces, you cannot roll from the last workspace to the first, or vice versa.  You must flip all the way back.

This patch, to the file workspace.c, changes that:

--- workspace.c~        2005-07-13 10:06:21.000000000 -0700
+++ workspace.c 2006-01-06 21:11:36.000000000 -0800
@@ -758,13 +758,13 @@
     }

   if (layout.current_col < 0)
-    layout.current_col = 0;
-  if (layout.current_col >= layout.cols)
     layout.current_col = layout.cols - 1;
+  if (layout.current_col >= layout.cols)
+    layout.current_col = 0;
   if (layout.current_row < 0)
-    layout.current_row = 0;
-  if (layout.current_row >= layout.rows)
     layout.current_row = layout.rows - 1;
+  if (layout.current_row >= layout.rows)
+    layout.current_row = 0;

   i = layout.grid[layout.current_row * layout.cols + layout.current_col];

Why this isn’t implemented by default is beyond me. This patch has worked it Metacity 2.x since the beginning, and works great with Metacity 2.24.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Ah, Metastacy, the tumor of window managers!


(If you couldn't tell, I hate that dain-brammaged window manager. olvwm has more functionality. I'll never understand why Gnome abandoned Sawfish, or abandoned Linux. They seem to be trying to make Gnome into a Winblows clone. Sadly.)

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

Sawfish was pretty rockin'. Moreso back when it was Sawmill, though - when Gnome started using it they removed a bunch of useful functionality from the conf apps. Meant I had to do more hand-coding of Lisp.

That window manager introduced me to directional control of windows - move this window left until it bangs into something, focus the window below the current one, and similar actions. So much better than cycling through a list.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Why would anyone at your workplace care about which window manager you're using?

I've used Windowmaker forever, but I'm trying to get out a bit and try some others. Right now I'm messing with Enlightenment 17.

[cthulu-for-pm.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing here, but my thought would be that looking at a different environment would help you focus on what it is you're supposed to be doing - this is my work space, and that is my play space.

Personally, I use KDE 3.5 - KDE 4, when last I tried migrating to it, was an unmitigated disaster. I hope it improves, but in the meantime, I have about 30+ packages pinned at the 3.5 version on my Debian box at work.