It already does if the window has meaningful size increments (e.g. a
terminal). It doesn't bother for regular windows though - does anyone
care about 598 vs. 599 pixels? While they may care about 80x24 vs.
80x25 terminals.

I am one of those users who cares about seeing the dimensions. I like
resizing my browser windows and such, but you feel this is just
another feature that adds more bloat to a wm, I will close the bug.

I don't know for sure if it's bloat or not, the metacity UI is an
ongoing experiment. Why do you like the dimensions?

There's some cost to them, since they are a bit distracting perhaps,
and maybe slow over a remote connection, and perhaps cause some
visible redraw trails. So I don't want to turn them on just for the
heck of it, but I'd like to understand why you find them useful.

I am a web developer/programmer and I use a desktop set at 1600x1200.
 When designing websites, I like to resize my galeon or mozilla to
common  resolutions (800x600, 1024x768, etc) to see how my site looks
at different resolutions (to see how words wrap, images stretch, etc).
 Before switching to metacity, I used sawfish and windowmaker which
both had this feature which made it very easy for me to change the
size of my webbrowser.

Yea, I second Alex's opinion for web design purposes, ALTHOUGH I am
not sure if it is the window manager's job to take care of these. 

One solution I used once was to make a just visible hairline grid on
my wallpaper image that showed the common sizes (so that it took my
gnome panels into account too) - it was then easy to "resize the
browser inside the grid"

Or just make a local HTML page that you bookmark that has some
javascript links to open browser windows at different dimensions. That
would probably work even better.

Not that this is relevant to Metacity, but I think a lot of the
"problems" are very often things we just learned to solve one way, and
never thought of other possible solutions. A window manager is not
exactly a web designer tool. Still, my fvwm had "resize to 800x600"
etc. in the window menu, so I know it was fun and useful. But I think
the wallpaper thingy would also be very nice - besides, it can be
pretty cool looking thing even. Or someone could do a webdesigner
portal site with links to all nice things like php manual and stuff,
google, javascript links to popup those certain sized browsers etc, so
that it would itself pop into a very compact browser window without
toolbars, that you could then put on the corner of your  desktop where
it is when you need it.

Anyway, off to go look at the sunny weather outside..

Bookmarklets exist for this exact purpose (resizing windows). (:
http://www.bookmarklets.com/tools/windowing/

I think we should close this if the web page testing is the 
only use case. It's pretty geeky to show the size of a window 
in pixels anyway.

*** Bug 106645 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I haven't yet read the suggestion that seems to me most obvious: bind
the dimension box to a modifier key (e.g. Shift).

This seems consistent with e.g. edge snapping, which is another
feature of 'UI micromanagement' that most users would never use and
indeed even those users who would use it would only do so in certain
cases: it seems to me that this is a good argument for including the
resize popup box as a modifier-controlled feature: it's too trivial to
warrant a configuration option but is easily implemented inside the
WM; and achieving the same result outside the WM requires
application-specific behaviour (bookmarklets) or modifying one's
working environment (the wallpaper suggestion).

In response to a request from an end user, I tried implementing this
feature and discovered it to be easy to hook into the code for the
resize popup on terminal windows; the changes required were an
additional argument to a few internal functions and a small amount of
logic code. These changes do not appreciably increase code complexity
and indeed in a few cases make the internal API more symmetric.

I have made a patch against the latest release version which I will
post here in the hope that it will be accepted and to get it into the
open.

Created attachment 23071 [details] [review]
Patch to enable resize popup when Shift pressed

Shift already does something (edge snap), though the basic idea of
binding this to a modifier seems reasonable.

I'd open a new bug with your patch, as nobody ever looks at closed
bugs really...

Discussion of modifier key as trigger -> Bug 130821