Metacity is not a meta-City as in an urban center, but rather Meta-ness as in the state of being meta. i.e. metacity : meta as opacity : opaque. Also it may have something to do with the Meta key on UNIX keyboards. The first release of Metacity was version 2.3. Metacity has no need for your petty hangups about version numbers. COMPILING METACITY === You need GTK+ 2.0, ideally the latest in the 2.0.x series. REPORTING BUGS AND SUBMITTING PATCHES === Report new bugs on http://bugzilla.gnome.org. Feel free to send patches too; Metacity is really small and simple, so if you find a bug or want to add a feature it should be pretty easy. Send me mail, or put the patch in bugzilla. See the HACKING file for some notes on hacking Metacity. METACITY FEATURES === - Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios. - Uses GTK+ 2.0 for drawing window frames. This means colors, fonts, etc. come from GTK+ theme. - Has a simple theme system and a couple of extra themes come with it. Change themes via gconf-editor or gconftool: gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/theme Crux gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/theme Gorilla gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/theme Atlanta gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/theme Bright See theme-format.txt for docs on the theme format. Use metacity-theme-viewer to preview themes. - Change number of workspaces via gconf-editor or gconftool: gconftool-2 --type=int --set /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces 5 Can also change workspaces from GNOME 2 pager. - Change focus mode: gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode mouse gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode sloppy gconftool-2 --type=string --set /apps/metacity/general/focus_mode click - Global keybindings: Alt-F1 to Alt-F6 switch workspaces Alt-1 to Alt-6 switch workspaces Alt-Tab forward cycle window focus Alt-Shift-Tab backward cycle focus Alt-Ctrl-Tab forward cycle focus among panels Alt-Ctrl-Shift-Tab backward cycle focus among panels Alt-Escape focus previous window Ctrl-Alt-Left Arrow previous workspace Ctrl-Alt-Right Arrow next workspace Ctrl-Alt-D minimize/unminimize all, to show desktop - Window keybindings: Alt-space window menu Mnemonics work in the menu. That is, Alt-space then underlined letter in the menu item works. Choose Move from menu, and arrow keys to move the window. While moving, hold down Control to move slower, and Shift to snap to edges. Choose Resize from menu, and nothing happens yet, but eventually I might implement something. - Window mouse bindings: Clicking anywhere on frame with button 1 will raise/focus window If you click a window control, such as the close button, then the control will activate on button release if you are still over it on release (as with most GUI toolkits) If you click and drag borders with button 1 it resizes the window If you click and drag the titlebar with button 1 it moves the window. If you click anywhere on the frame with button 3 it shows the window menu. If you hold down Alt and click inside a window, it will move the window (buttons 1 and 2) or show menu (button 3). If you pick up a window with button 1 and then switch workspaces the window will come with you to the new workspace, this is a feature copied from Enlightenment. If you hold down Shift while moving a window, the window snaps to edges of other windows and the screen. - Session management: Metacity connects to the session manager and will set itself up to be respawned. It theoretically restores sizes/positions/workspace for session-aware applications. - Metacity implements much of the new window manager spec from freedesktop.org, and much of the ICCCM. But then there are parts of each that it doesn't implement, just because I haven't yet. - Uses Pango to render text, so has cool i18n capabilities. Supports UTF-8 window titles and such. - There are simple animations for actions such as minimization, to help users see what is happening. Should probably have a few more of these and make them nicer. - if you have the proper X setup, set the GDK_USE_XFT=1 environment variable to get antialiased window titles. - considers the panel when placing windows and maximizing them. METACITY BUGS, NON-FEATURES, AND CAVEATS === - If you want keybindings which are not the ones mentioned above as features, you have to edit keybindings.c and recompile. - Some of the default keybindings (notable Alt+number) are total crackrock. This is just because I like those keybindings and things aren't configurable yet. Once bindings are configurable the dumb defaults will go away. - You need an EWMH-spec compliant pager/tasklist to be able to navigate graphically; this does NOT include GNOME 1.x, but should include GNOME 2 and KDE 3. - Metacity turns off its keybindings for Emacs, because I use Alt-space in Emacs, and getting a window menu annoys me. This is a broken feature that will go away when keybindings are configurable. - I haven't even read the ICCCM section about colormaps. So if you have an 8-bit display you are probably screwed. - Metacity doesn't properly claim the window manager selection as described in the ICCCM. But then, most other window managers don't handle this correctly either. - There are probably other ICCCM-compliance issues. - Window placement is always cascade for now; I want to implement "first fit, falling back to cascade if no fit." (Configurable placement algorithms are stupid though, don't send me patches for any bogus ones. Let's just pick a good one.) - Should Metacity support flipping in right-to-left locales? I don't know what window managers look like in a right-to-left locale. I assume the window titles should be right-justified; should the window controls also be flipped? - Resize menu item doesn't do anything. It's intended to enter resize-with-the-keyboard mode, similar to Move menu item. - In GNOME 1.x, if you switch from sawfish to metacity without restarting X, the panel often ends up buried behind the Nautilus desktop window. What happens is that the panel detects Sawfish has gone away, and turns on override redirect mode because no GNOME-aware WM is running (i.e. it goes into "ignore the window manager" mode). But the panel doesn't notice that Metacity has appeared and is (partially) GNOME-compliant. So Metacity doesn't see the override redirect panel, and leaves it behind the Nautilus desktop. I'm not sure whether Metacity or the panel is to blame for this. (To debug - use "xwininfo" on the panel, if override redirect is "Yes" then Metacity won't have any awareness of a window and can't properly stack it above the desktop. If override redirect is "No" then Metacity can see the panel and handle it properly. Look at xstuff.c:xstuff_is_compliant_wm() in the panel to get started on how the panel deals with this.) - In GNOME 1.x, If you have "put panel below other windows" turned on in panel Global Preferences, Miscellaneous tab, you need to change this to "Put panel on top of other windows." That's because Metacity uses semantic categories, not the legacy layer system in the GNOME spec. It treats things in the legacy "dock" layer as semantic type dock, but if you have the panel set to be in another layer, Metacity will think it's a normal window. You can diagnose this problem because Metacity will put panels in the wrong place, and Alt+rightclick will let you perform operations like minimize/maximize, and Alt+leftclick will let you move the panel. If Metacity has detected that the panel is a panel, then none of this will be enabled. I put a patch in the CVS version of the panel to fix this by setting the new non-legacy type hint, but a panel with that patch hasn't been released yet. FAQ === Q: Will you add my feature? A: If it makes sense to turn on unconditionally, or is genuinely a harmless preference that I would not be embarrassed to put in a simple, uncluttered, user-friendly configuration dialog. If the only rationale for your feature is that other window managers have it, or that you are personally used to it, or something like that, then I will not be impressed. Metacity is firmly in the "choose good defaults" camp rather than the "offer 6 equally broken ways to do it, and let the user pick one" camp. This is part of a "no crackrock" policy, despite some exceptions I'm mildly embarrassed about. For example, multiple workspaces probably constitute crackrock, they confuse most users and really are not that useful if you have a decent tasklist and so on. But I am too used to them to turn them off. Or alternatively iconification/tasklist is crack, and workspaces/pager are good. But having both is certainly a bit wrong. Sloppy focus is probably crackrock too. Oh, and my Alt-1 thru Alt-6 keybindings are definitely on crack. But don't think unlimited crack is OK just because I slipped up a little. No slippery slope here. Don't let this discourage patches and fixes - I love those. ;-) Just be prepared to hear the above objections if your patch adds some crack-ridden configuration option. Q: Will Metacity be part of GNOME? A: Many people are now asking for this, though it was not the original plan - Metacity started out as sort of an experiment. A decision hasn't really been made but the issue will probably be raised shortly after the GNOME 2 release. Q: Is Metacity a Red Hat project? A: Metacity is in no way funded, endorsed, or encouraged by Red Hat, Inc. - I'm guessing Red Hat would not consider "insufficient number of window managers for Linux" an urgent problem. Just a wild guess though. Q: Why does Metacity remember the workspace/position of some apps but not others? A: Metacity only stores sizes/positions for apps that are session managed. As far as I can determine, there is no way to attempt to remember workspace/position for non-session-aware apps without causing a lot of weird effects. The reason is that you don't know which non-SM-aware apps were launched by the session. When you initially log in, Metacity sees a bunch of new windows appear. But it can't distinguish between windows that were stored in your session, or windows you just launched after logging in. If Metacity tried to guess that a window was from the session, it could e.g. end up maximizing a dialog, or put a window you just launched on another desktop or in a weird place. And in fact I see a lot of bugs like this in window managers that try to handle non-session-aware apps. However, for session-aware apps, Metacity can tell that the application instance is from the session and thus restore it reliably, assuming the app properly restores the windows it had open on session save. So the correct way to fix the situation is to make apps session-aware. libSM has come with X for years, it's very standardized, it's shared by GNOME and KDE - even twm is session-aware. So anyone who won't take a patch to add SM is more archaic than twm - and you should flame them. ;-) Docs on session management: ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/doc/hardcopy/SM/xsmp.PS.gz ftp://ftp.x.org:21/pub/R6.4/xc/doc/hardcopy/SM/SMlib.PS.gz See also the ICCCM section on SM. For GNOME apps, use the GnomeClient object. For a simple example of using libSM directly, twm/session.c in the twm source code is pretty easy to understand. Q: How about adding viewports in addition to workspaces? A: I could conceivably be convinced to use viewports _instead_ of workspaces, though currently I'm not thinking that. But I don't think it makes any sense to have both; it's just confusing. They are functionally equivalent. You may think this means that you won't have certain keybindings, or something like that. This is a misconception. The only _fundamental_ difference between viewports and workspaces is that with viewports, windows can "overlap" and appear partially on one and partially on another. All other differences that traditionally exist in other window managers are accidental - the features commonly associated with viewports can be implemented for workspaces, and vice versa. So I don't want to have two kinds of workspace/desktop/viewport/whatever, but I'm willing to add features traditionally associated with either kind if those features make sense. Q: Did you spend a lot of time on this? A: Originally the answer was no. Sadly the answer is now yes. Still, it's only 12,000 lines of code. Q: How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager? A: I have no comment on that.