GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 101151
Super vs. Alt for dragging windows
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 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.
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.
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.
is this bug not resolved in CVS now? I think we can close it safely.
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.