Edge resistance without stickiness (as in Metacity)

[Johan Walles]

Binary package hint: compiz

With Metacity:
1. Open a Window on an empty desktop.
2. Drag it to the left until it touches the screen border.
3. Notice how the window stops when it reaches the border, until you push it far enough when it starts moving again.
4. Pull it back from the edge. Notice how it pulls back immediately, without sticking to the screen edge.

Now, try the same thing with "Normal" desktop effects enabled.
1. Open a Window on an empty desktop.
2. Drag it to the left until it touches the screen border.
3. Notice how the window acts just as described in point 3 in the Metacity part above.
4. Pull it back from the edge. Notice how (unlike Metacity) the window sticks to the screen edge.

I would like the Metacity edge behavior with desktop effects enabled as well.

[Johan Walles (walles)]

This is with gutsy and compiz 1:0.6.0+git20071008-0ubuntu1.1.

[Caroline Ford (secretlondon)]

new ->wishlist

[Pausanias (pausanias)]

I'd like to second this! Can we get edge resistance to behave exactly as in metacity?

[diego (diego-pemas)]

Me too, this is very handy and it is currently missing in compiz

[kmyers1us (kmyers1us)]

Me Three. Besides the edge resistance problem, my app windows top border (close, minim, max) fall behind the top panel
and nearly always need to be "moved" away from the panel. I do autohide it as a workaround for now. When I turn off
compiz, this never happens.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

may someone interested on the feature forward this upstream to http://bugs.opencompositing.org/ ? I'm leaving this as incomplete until that, thanks in advance.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

I sent it upstream.

[David Siegel (djsiegel-deactivatedaccount)]

Please try the compiz settings changes described in bug #495708 and let me know if they address this problem.

[Johan Walles (walles)]

Hi David!

I just failed to enable Desktop Effects on my Karmic system, so I can't try the suggestion out for you.

However, a four step repro instruction is at the top of this bug report, so you should be able to try this on your own machine.

Basically, I really want windows to snap to edges and to each other. Because of this bug however, snapping in Compiz is just frustrating and hard to understand.

Unfortunately I can't see how changing the snap distance as suggested in the other bug report would change this. It would make the brokenness less visible, but it would still be broken and get in the way. What I want is a usable and helpful snapping implementation like the one in Metacity, not a broken one like the one in Compiz.

[Johan Walles (walles)]

I got my Desktop Effects going, and edge resistance is still broken with your suggested change.

It's not as pronounced as before, but it's still broken.

As long as it's broken, turning it off is probably a better workaround than trying to hide it.

The sensitivity setting should be increased if anything, but without fixing the implementation first it would make the current implementation even more annoying...

[Mike Hicks (hick0088)]

The edge snap behavior in Compiz is fairly strange to me, and I'm having trouble getting accustomed to it. I think most window managers going back more than a decade through Metacity, Sawfish, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, AfterStep, and FVWM have used roughly the same algorithms. It would be best if Compiz could continue this historical behavior. On MS Windows, I even use a utility called "allSnap" which operates very similarly to historical Unix window managers.

[jhfhlkjlj (fdsuufijjejejejej-deactivatedaccount)]

This is still confirmed in Oneiric.

[Eleni Maria Stea (hikiko)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug. The compiz program that we currently use in Ubuntu is a C++ re-write of the original compiz and was announced the 4th July 2010. Therefore, the bugs that were reported before that date, will be marked as "Won't Fix" as they probably exist in the original program which is not stored in launchpad. (The last LTS that used the old compiz is the 10.04 which is not supported anymore).