To upgrade this website to Movable Type, among other things.
Last-minute hacking with my version of Metacity, and I finally got what I wanted. Basically, I was using xfwm4 for window management, and since it is NETWM compliant, I was supposed to notice no difference at all in GNOME. Except that’s not true, since xfwm4 doesn’t know about gnome-panel, and since a lot of useful hotkeys I want to use in gnome-panel are generally bound in metacity. Plus, the gnome theme manager doesn’t work without metacity. So, shame on GNOME developers, basically. You claim you are compliant, but you aren’t.
But then I did some reading and figured out metacity is actually a bit better than xfwm4 anyway, just that some of its features are hidden in gconf and other places. Also, someone has coded a neat app called devil’s pie which lets you manager your windows at a very fine-grained level, which I like… though it is a bit buggy right now, it shows promise.
So, the main thing I was annoyed by is vertical/horizontal maximize. xfwm4 has this working fine, and I’m quite used to it. Metacity doesn’t treat it as a “toggle,” so if you hit maximize vertical button twice, you just sit there with a maximized window… it doesn’t switch back and forth. I find this annoying since when I have vim windows open, sometimes to see more I just quickly maximize vertical rather than scrolling down, and then toggle it back afterwards.
Someone coded a patch to this. You can find it on bugzilla here at Bug #113601. Unfortunately, no one has written a “proper patch” that also works with session management and such, but I don’t really care, I wanted this patch to get back to work. So, in order to jive with my Ubuntu system, I created some debs with the patched version of metacity.