geek + red sox + cooking = peter ryan

Today I was experimenting with Advanced Desktop Effects for Kubuntu Gutsy. I set them up easily enough. I first removed everything I had installed before (legacy beryl) and reinstalled CompizFusion according to the ubuntu help documentation.

Everything installed fine but I ran into a troubling issue. I was looking at the list of activated plugins and trying to get a handle on everything (including what the super key is…I still have no idea but I’ll figure it out soon enough) and after playing with the “Move window plugin” which was tied to ALT-F7 I said “that is cool but I’ll never use it…I’ll just drag the window around with my mouse” and disabled it.

Anyway that behavior was opposite of what I was expecting. The compiz desktop effect was also the base move window action so disabling it made it impossible to move any windows at all. I re-enabled it and moving windows (with the mouse) once again worked as expected.

I suspect that other effect “plugins” behave similarly so when playing with desktop effects be careful what you disable! IMHO a window manager’s core functionality includes things like “move window” “resize window” and treating them like plugins as opposed to core elements is an extreme that could lead an unaware user down a road that disables features that one might view as critical. That said there are things like “Application Switcher”, “Ring Switcher”, and “Shift Swticher” all of which are different ways to switch between windows. So I guess one could deliver an alternate “Move Window plugin.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 11:35 am and is filed under compiz, gutsy, ubuntu, geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.