GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 85213
Metacity should pop up a box showing the dimensions of a window when resizing
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
When you are resizing a window in metacity, a window should pop up telling you the current dimensions of the window as your are resizing. I'm not sure if this functionality already exists, but I couldn't find a gconf key for it. I feel this is a very important usabilty feature that is missing from metacity.
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