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Bug 101151 - Super vs. Alt for dragging windows
Super vs. Alt for dragging windows
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: metacity
Classification: Other
Component: general
2.4.x
Other All
: Normal major
: ---
Assigned To: Metacity maintainers list
Metacity maintainers list
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2002-12-13 18:23 UTC by Rodney Dawes
Modified: 2004-12-22 21:47 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---



Description Rodney Dawes 2002-12-13 18:23:15 UTC
The new version of metacity replaces Alt with Super as the default key for
dragging windows. This is a major usability issue which will bring up a lot
of support questions. Because people have no idea what Super is, and they
immediately lose a piece of functionality that gets used quite frequently.
If this change was made to avoid conflicting with GIMP, or something, I
believe GIMP was changed long ago in 1.2.x to not use Alt+Drag for that
piece of functionality, due to the sawfish behaviour. Please change Super
back to Alt before 2.2 is actually released.
Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2002-12-13 19:32:15 UTC
Well, I got complaints about this with respect to Gimp, nautilus, and
several proprietary apps. It'd help if we displayed "Windows Logo"
instead of Super perhaps (I thought I'd done that, even, in Windows
capplet).

I realize it will be a FAQ but it seems to me apps should work out of
the box.
Comment 2 Rodney Dawes 2002-12-13 19:50:51 UTC
Right. However... but it should be something less keyboard-specific.
Maybe C-A-Drag or something. A user on a Sun or Mac will look at it
and see "Windows Key".... "Where is the windows key?". It's also the
case that the windows key is not Super a lot of the time. I think
there is even code in the kernel... or something... that makes the R/L
windows keys move to the next Virtual Terminal that is to the Right or
Left of the current one. So, assuming X is on vt7, it would take you
to the next active VT, which will probably either be a vt waiting for
a login, or the system console. I don't know if this behaviour has
changed recently (since I started using a Mac as my main machine). I
think the ideal solution is to ensure that GNOME works out of the box
on a standard 101key layout. I don't know. Keyboard/distro/etc...
specific defaults don't seem the right way to go.
Comment 3 Rob Adams 2003-02-22 23:21:44 UTC
is this bug not resolved in CVS now?  I think we can close it safely.
Comment 4 Elijah Newren 2004-03-08 06:36:25 UTC
I'm just adding a comment here because I'm going to be adding a
reference to this bug in Metacity's rationales.txt file.  Metacity had
used Super+click for a while (see bug 79315, in addition to the
comments in this bug), but did indeed change back to Alt+click with
the following ChangeLog:

2003-01-09 Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>

* src/metacity.schemas.in: change Windows+click back to Alt+click,
Windows+click just surprised everybody and didn't work half the
time. Maya users can configure it, and GTK DND can change its
default.