[Usability]A "cheat" to full window manager integration
- From: James Ramsey <jjramsey_6x9eq42 yahoo com>
- To: usability gnome org
- Subject: [Usability]A "cheat" to full window manager integration
- Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2002 13:59:37 -0700 (PDT)
This is somewhat of a retread of "Adapting
Metacity-Setup for GNOME2?", but hopefully without the
clumsy verbiage, and perhaps some better ideas.
Here's my steps to make the window manager disappear
completely into GNOME2:
1) Make Metacity the default window manager. Drop
Sawfish and its dialogs from the default GNOME2 setup,
including the Desktop Preferences->Advanced menu.
2) Add an entry to the Desktop Preferences menu called
"Window Frame Style". Clicking on this menu should
launch a capplet for changing the Metacity theme.
(This capplet could be a "surgically altered"
Metacity-Setup
<http://plastercast.tzo.com/~plastercast/Projects/Metacity-Setup-0.6-Screenshot.png>
with the "Functionality" section removed.)
3) Change the name of the "Theme" entry in the Desktop
Preferences menu to "Widget Style," in order to be
consistent with the "Window Frame Style" entry.
That should be enough to make the window manager seem
to sink into the desktop environment.
There are a few main problems with this scheme.
A) The presence of the term "widget". This is probably
the yuckiest part. However, the fact of the matter is
that even if a theme-using user never sees the term
"widget," he or she will have deal with the fact that
the theme that changes the widgets and the theme that
changes the window frames are very different. Somehow
that has to be conveyed. Any ideas?
B) It seems to lock one in to using Metacity. This
could probably be fixed by eventually replacing the
new Metacity-specific dialog with a correct one.
C) It doesn't solve the problem of the current
font-changing dialog (at the Desktop Preferences->Font
menu entry) not being the place where titlebar fonts
are changed. This could be fixed at a later date,
though.
In short, I think my little "cheat" is an adequate way
to get GNOME2 all the way to complete window manager
integration. It doesn't solve all the UI problems, but
it doesn't get in the way of future attempts at
refinement either.
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