Window Border Re-size Dragging difficult to grab border

[Jeff]

I have a hard time re-sizing a window. When I try to grab the border it seems way too difficult to hover the cursor EXACTLY in the right place. This sounds trivial but there is no obvious workaround.

[Alex (alexlsh)]

I can't confirm this bug. I tested it in Ubuntu 14.04 and windows resizing is very easy. Mouse cursor positioning on window border is easy too.
May be this is dependent on theme you use. What theme you use in Mate?

[nadrimajstor (ipejic)]

Not sure is it app dependent but I do experience this issue (both on all default ubuntu-mate 14.10 and PPA upgraded Ubuntu 14.04).
Dotted triangle in the lower right corner are easy targets, however other sides of window are mostly pixel-hunt for resize-handle (I hope picture in the attachment is a good example).

[Jeff (bigcotechjeff)]

Hello Alex. I was using the fresh install of both ubuntu-mate 14.10 and 14.04 with the default themes. I've had this trouble with XFCE in the past on these laptops so maybe it has to do with my Laptop's drivers if you don't observe it on your rig. It's a frustrating obstacle especially when using a touchpad. If there was just a way to widen the border sensitivity a few pixels. I'm a long time Cinnamon user and find those window borders very easy to grab and resize. Thanks. Let me know if I can help.

[Alex (alexlsh)]

Look at my screenshot (sorry, without a cursor). For my test border sensitivity width is not less than 4 pixels (may be 5). Is this width is not enough for you? May be for touchpad is not so good as for mouse. What was the border width when you use Cinnamon? May be this is really problem for some people, but on my side I see no problem (and I have not very good eyes).

[Dave H (dave-hills-2009)]

Yes this affects me too. I find really irritating that there is only 1 pixel at the bottom right corner on some apps to grab hold of. Some examples of Apps with "no grab Corner" that I use are:
1) Chromium
2) Mate Terminal
3) Filezilla
4) Hexchat
5) LibraOffice Apps.

My wish is for the developers to please:

1) include a facility in the "Appearance Preferences" > "Customise Theme" > "Window Boarder", to be able to set the window boarder size in the range, say between 1 to 10 pixels in width. I know some of the Window Themes have wider boarders but I like the default Ambient-Mate window theme.
or
2) Include the "Bottom Right grab thingy" in all windows
or
3) Include Window themes with two or more window boarder sizes.
or
4) Just modify the default Ambient-Mate window theme to have a 3 pixel window boarder!

This is a usability situation so quite important in my view. For the "User group" that just installs and uses Mate, having difficulty in grabbing the window sides of the majority of Apps could be a real "put off".

For now I'm using the Dopple-left window theme, it has a 3 pixel window boarder that I can grab with my mouse and mouse quite easily.

kind regards

Dave_H

[Martin Wimpress  (flexiondotorg)]

There are 2 solutions to this issue:

  * Alt+F8 allows you to resize any window from anywhere within it.
  * Alt+Right Click will grab the closest resize region to the current mouse position.

[nadrimajstor (ipejic)]

Alt+F8 is nice for a cursor based workflow.
Alt+R.Click is a pure diamond. (didn't know this one)

[JayJay (jukka-jalava)]

 Alt+Right Click is very nice *once you KNOW it*

A more intuituve choice would be extending the grabbable area outside the narrow border to make it easier to hit.

I don't remember which windowing system it was (gnome-x ?), but somewhere sometime there was an option to define how much the mouse cursor would "stick" to the border. I.e. when you try to move the mouse slowly out of a window, the cursor would keep jumping back to the border making it easy to grab. Jerking the mouse a bit, or moving fast allowed you to cross the "magnetic" border. Another advantage was that it stopped your mouse from accidentally wandering to an other window when having focus follow mouse.
That's what I would vote for, if it was doable in Mate.

[Dave H (dave-hills-2009)]

Yes !! Alt-Right Click does it for me, many thanks.

Is there a published list of Mate desktop "magic" anywhere, perhaps it could be added to the "useful information area".

[Evaldas Granickas (evaldasgr)]

Those are not solutions, they're workarounds. Resizing windows should be as easy as dragging the corner or the edge to whereever I want, not by pressing some weird keyboard combination.

[trallallero (trallallerotrallalla)]

ALT+R does not work on Ubuntu if it's running on VirtualBox so it's not even a workaround.

[Joseph Aczel (jaczel-i)]

I found that this bug only applies when using any of the pre-defined Panel Layouts: Cupertino, Fedora, Redmond, etc. When I use the default Ubuntu Mate Panel Layout there is no issue.

I'm running Ubuntu Mate 16.04

I agree with other users that I think it has to do with the window border pixel range.

[MALDATA (malocascio)]

Since the duplicate (160311) is marked as fixed and is no longer likely to be serviced, I'll post here.

This still seems like something that should be fixed. I'm running Ubuntu Mate (Ubuntu 16.04, Mate 1.12.1) and this is extremely frustrating, particularly because the Mate terminal doesn't have a border handle, and I use terminals constantly.

The alt+right click trick is nice, but the fact that I needed to look for a bug report in order to find a workaround for window resizing is distressing.

[Rik Shaw (rik-shaw)]

This "bug" is the primary reason that we have not been able to consider MATE. With the move to GTK3 I am hopeful that finally theming will allow better resize of windows? Yes I know the workarounds with alt, go to the corner, etc. but this is hard to teach to new "beginning users" so we are now distributing Cinnamon.

Does anyone have comments regarding GTK3+ migration helping out in this regard?

[Rik Shaw (rik-shaw)]

Update: as referenced here ==> https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/make-window-resizing-easier-out-of-the-box/5845/25 using Metacity with the "software compositor" helps a lot in this regard. The "shadow area" of about 5-7 pixels is available to "grab" for resizing windows.

[David Jennings (mail-davidjennings)]

I hit this bug on a stock install of Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on a laptop. It makes window resizing with the mouse or pointer almost impossible.

[DBooth (david-dbooth)]

I am still having this problem under Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome. It is a frustration and a *serious* waste of time.

[Rimu Atkinson (rimu)]

Still happening on 18.04 with Mate.

It seems to only affect the Marco (Compton GPU Compositor) window manager - not Compiz or Marco (No Compositor).