ARRGH! Metacity is killing me.

[Chris Kloiber]

On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 12:11, Matthew Miller wrote:
> Okay, so there's the general new Orwellian mantra of "lack of features is
> better!" and "your preferences are scientificially proven to be not very
> usable by you despite what you think" and "shut up; human factors are
> perfectly quantifiable and we measured this and who the hell do you think
> you are". 
> 
> Okay, fine. Off to the reeducation camps with my computer habits. It's more
> convenient to find a tiny little pager applet in the middle of the bottom of
> the screen than to be able to configure the scroll wheel to flip desktops.
> And it's obviously better to not be able to click on a link in a background
> window without it jumping to the top and covering up everything else I'm
> working on -- I couldn't possibly be working on *more than one thing at
> once*.
> 
> But *why* can't I push windows off the top of the screen with alt-drag?
> Maybe I want them up there! I thought this whole "spatial browsing paradigm"
> -- who knew it was a *paradigm*? -- I just thought it was tedious and
> annoying and filled up your workspace with clutter, but science has shown
> the error of my ways -- anyway, this "paradigm" was all about stability of
> physical relationships between virtual objects. Well, dammit, why's the top
> of the screen suddenly hard and fast?
> 
> Is this helping user-friendlyness by assuming that I'm so stupid that I know
> how to use alt-drag to move the window *off* the screen, but might, in the
> next few minutes, forget that I can do that to get it back on and be
> bewildered forever looking for the title bar?
> 
> Arrrgh.
> 
> Okay, I feel better now.
> 
> The question is: how can I change the window manager Gnome uses to something
> a little more _flexible? I've got Window Maker installed, but then I
> discovered that the new GNOME apparently has no visible option for changing
> window manager. (Of course! It's better that way! Why would you want to
> change it away from the perfect-for-all-humanity defaults?!?) So I did some
> googling, and discovered that there's a GConf setting for this. So I use
> gconf-editor and change it. Log out, log back in again, and hey, lookit
> that, no effect at all.
> 
> There's got to be a way. What am I missing here? Or should I just ditch
> GNOME entirely and go back to my happy little Window Maker world?

Well. I *like* metacity, but I thought I'd try to change it to sawfish
just to see if it still works. Sawfish is already installed as part of
an "@ Everything" install of FC2-test3, so I thought I would try this
one liner:

$ killall -v metacity && sawfish

What do you know, it worked. Log out and save changes on exit. Logged
back in, and sawfish is still there. Might not be the best/approved way
of doing it, but it works for me.

Oh, and using ALT-Drag, it seems you can move the window up off the top
of the screen using Sawfish, too.

-- 
Chris Kloiber