Margaret (pling) wrote,
Margaret
pling
  • Mood: cheerful
  • Music: Steven Wilson "NSRGNTS RMXS"

Compiz & Other Geeky Witterings

Finally got round to reinstalling compiz a couple of days ago, I'd stopped using it ages ago (like a year or two) coz it was a faff to switch on & off to play fullscreen games & if you didn't it all died horribly. But now I don't play games in linux much if ever, so that was irrelevant. And anyway, it appears easier to switch it on & off (I think last time I used it fusion-icon wasn't in portage so you had to do some song & dance to install it so I didn't & that made switching window manager more hassle, but now it's there like it oughta be).

So once again windows wobble when I move them around & go up in flames when I close them. I'm all about the simple pleasures in life ;) The desktop cube and the transparent window borders are neat too, but it really is all about the fire effect and making the windows bounce. There's a plugin to let you draw fire on the screen too ... not that that is useful but if I was bored, you know? Fire :D

I'd forgotten that it installs with nothing switched on tho. It still strikes me as an odd way to go about it. I mean, is there really anyone out there who doesn't want the ability to move their windows around? So couldn't we have the move window plugin on by default? And most of us want window borders too. And the ability to resize windows. Or is it coz most people get compiz coz it comes with their distro & thus it has a basic set up done by the distro? I guess if you're installing it yourself you're capable of working out how to switch on the bits & pieces. Still seems weird tho.

One thing that's niggling at me is the workspaces/viewports thing. The cube has 4 viewports, these exist inside a Gnome workspace as I understand it. So I'm now only using one Gnome workspace, so I wanted to turn it down to one workspace for tidiness sake. But I don't seem to be able to :/ If I'm running metacity I right click on the workspace chooser on my panel, go to preferences & change the number of workspaces. But that option doesn't exist when I'm running compiz and setting it metacity doesn't change what it is in compiz. I looked at gconf-editor to see if I could find where to set it manually, but the only things I could find were the setting I'd changed in metacity (/apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces ... so it was set to 1 already), /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/number_of_workspaces which is deprecated and /schemas/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/number_of_workspaces which doesn't seem to be changeable. Admittedly I only did a search for "workspace" in gconf-editor, maybe it's called something different? But my google-fu fails me too, I get lots of results suggesting the way to change it that sticks for metacity only, and a load of irrelevant stuff coz workspace/desktop/viewport aren't precisely unique terms. Anyone any ideas? It's just for tidiness tho, like I said, it's not a deal breaker or even important, and I've made the workspace switcher "only display current workspace" so it doesn't look weird.

And the other change I've made to my desktop is turning on the auto-hinter useflag on media-libs/freetype so all my fonts are rendered differently. They're nicer looking, that's for sure. But it all looks different and that's mentally disturbing, somehow. Of course in a day or two it'll just be "the way things are" again. And they do all look smoother & nicer, so I'll stick it out.
Tags: computer, gentoo
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