Re: mutter: always place new windows at center

[Adam Dingle <adam yorba org>]

On 04/03/2011 08:29 AM, William Jon McCann wrote:
> 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.

OK, great.  Here it is:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646629

Further discussion can happen there.

adam