seife’s assorted rants

And while I am at it, some hints on getting GNOME a small little bit more usable. The problem is mostly the default window manager, and the gripes I’m having with it are basically the same that Linus Torvalds had some years ago. I want my window buttons to be configurable. To be more precise, I want the “maximize” button to behave like in almost every other window manager: 3 different mouse buttons, 3 different button actions: “maximize”, “maximize horizontally”, “maximize vertically”.
Linus’ problems have been addressed, and I’m explaining a lame workaround for my wishes to get something slightly similar to what I want. My workaround does only work because of the fixes for Linus’ problems.

After looking into the code I understood that the window buttons are only used with left-click, right and middle click are handled by the “window titlebar action” instead.

So I redefined the window titlebar mouse actions to do maximize horizontally / vertically on right click and double click. (I am pretty accustomed to having middle button on title bar put the window into the background, but I might change that).

So here’s what you have to do.

• open regedit.exe gconf-editor
• browse to /apps/metacity/general
• change action_double_click_titlebar to toggle_maximize_vertically
• change action_right_click_titlebar to toggle_maximize_horizontally

While you are at it, you might also enable resize_with_right_button, which restores even some more sanity.

For all those asking why I’m not using a different window manager with GNOME: been there, tried that, but the integration of them all was pretty horrible (keyboard shortcuts no longer easily configurable, …) and I want somehting that just works and does not always get in my way. If I wanted that, I could have kept KDE.

Today I discovered that my $HOME was nearly full. My machine has only moderate space for the encrypted /home partition, but there were almost 2GB free until a few days ago, so I decided to look where the space went.

It was easy: ~/.xsession-errors was over 1,5GB. I looked who was wanting to tell me lots of important stuff and found out that about every KDE4 program produced several debug lines, almost every second.
Since I doubt that anybody will ever want to look at 1,5GB logfiles, I just decided to redirect it to /dev/null in /usr/bin/startkde. Now only my submitrequest number 30607 needs to be accepted into KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop, so that everyone benefits from this solution.

Note: it took 15 days for the logfile to get that big, but to be honest: I don’t want to reboot every two weeks, only to keep KDE4 from crapping my home directory.
Second Note: If there had been any significant updates in FACTORY in the last two months, I would probably not even have noticed the problem, but there were none

Seeing that I apparently hit a nerve for some people with my last post, here is the next thing that really annoys me every day in KDE4.

Notifications.

Those ugly passive pop-ups that appear on the display near the area where you have configured the “system tray” to be on the panels. From the beginning they were an example of uglyness. After quite some time they at least stopped to be drawn one over the other, so they are no longer totally unusable, but they still are not pretty.
One example: most of them are too small, so that the text they should show me gets cut off and I have to guess what the system wants to tell me.

As much as I detest GNOME, their unobtrusive notifications in the lower right corner are much more stylish and less disturbing than the KDE4 ones.

And it is not QT’s fault: a proprietary application like skype, using QT, can do it in almost the same way as GNOME, so it is definitely possible.