Re: mutter: always place new windows at center

[William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hi Adam,

On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Adam Dingle <adam yorba org> wrote:
> (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?

I agree.  We've discussed this a bit on IRC a few times but I think it
is worth opening a new bug.

Thanks,
Jon