mutter: always place new windows at center

[Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>]

(This post is really about Mutter, not GNOME Shell.  As far as I can 
tell this list is where Mutter discussion happens, however.)

All I ask of a window manager when it places new windows is one thing: 
to put them at the center of the screen, always.  Despite Metacity's 
stated goal of being like Cheerios, not Fruit Loops, it goes through 
some tricky gymnastics to try to place new windows in supposedly nice 
places, presumably where they don't obscure existing windows.  In my 
experience this usually leads to windows being placed in the corner of 
the screen, typically the upper left, and so if I run a vanilla Metacity 
(or Mutter) I have to tediously drag each new window from there to the 
center of the screen where my attention is focused.

And so I've kept my copy of Metacity patched for the last few years now 
to place new windows at the center (except for some times when I've run 
Compiz instead, largely because among its thousand options is one to 
center new windows).  I originally got the patch from [1], created by a 
kindred soul who also wants the Zen simplicity of window centering. Just 
yesterday I merged my Metacity patches into my working copy of Mutter so 
I now have this window centering behavior even when running GNOME Shell.

This subject has been controversial in the past: a centering option was 
proposed in the past [2], and after lots of debate was marked as WONTFIX 
in Bugzilla.  But that was a few years ago, and in theory Mutter has 
forked from Metacity and could behave differently.  In the meantime, 
some of us are still patching Metacity/Mutter with every release.  So 
I'll open this for discussion again: would the Mutter developers take a 
patch which provides an option or GSettings key which causes Mutter to 
center all new windows?

adam

[1] - http://chad.glendenin.com/metacity/patch.html
[2] - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151818