GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 141411
Feature request: gconf option to allow offscreen move of windows.
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Experienced users often find it useful in other windowmanagers to move windows such that the titlebar is offscreen. For these users, an advanced option to allow this sort of usage would be appreciated. For many cases, this is more a 'luxury item', where it accomodates certain usage habits. Examples where this is less of a luxury, and more a requirement: -Badly designed applications and/or small displays where the top of needed UI elements are further from the top of the window titlebar than the display is high. Without a slippery desktop (which is annoying the 99% of the time when not dealing with broken apps) or a virtual desktop (not as convenient and also not available in metacity), there is no recourse with respect to such applications in metacity as it stands. I have written a quick preliminary patch to have a gconf option control this behavior against 2.8.0 available at: http://ura.dnsalias.org/~jbj/metacity.offscreen.patch
We've been around and around with this. Why would you need to move your window completely off screen? The only use case I've heard is if the window is too tall for an itty bitty display. In this case, metacity already allows you to move it offscreen. This is just a confusing option and it accomplishes nothing.
And just how does this work? Alt+Click isn't doing it, I don't see anything in the menus, and a glance through gconf-editor didn't turn up anything particularly relevant. How do I view the bottom of dialogs that don't fit on my screen?
If a dialog doesn't fit on the screen, metacity should let you move it off the top exactly far enough to be able to see the bottom of it If not, it's a bug, send us instructions on how to reproduce (what is your panel setup, which dialog in which app are you using, etc.)
Note that it won't let you do it if you can just resize the window to fit on the screen. If you have an application that lets you shrink the dialog so that interface elements are not visible and not accessible you should report a bug against that application and ask the app author to set the window size hints.
Should we just force the resize? I don't think resizing occurs to people, plus it is normally done from the bottom of the dialog.