Fix two Ubuntu 10.04 window manager annoyances

When upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 I noticed two annoyances (which actually are just a matter of personal taste):

  • The OSX-like positioning of the close, minimize and maximize buttons on the left instead of the right of the window.
  • The fade-out (invisibility) of other windows when using Alt-Tab for tabbing through the available windows on the current desktop.

As I tend to forget and need to Google every time I encounter a newly setup 10.04 system, I now jot down the settings to change.

For changing the window buttons:

  1. Start gconf-editor.
  2. Find /apps/metacity/general/button_layout.
  3. Change its value to menu:minimize,maximize,close.

For changing the opacity of inactive windows during Alt+Tab window switching:

  1. Start gconf-editor.
  2. Find /apps/compiz/plugins/staticswitcher/screen0/options/opacity.
  3. Change it to any value you like, where 100 is fully visible and 0 is totally invisible.

KDE-Style Window-Movement on Windows

One of the minor features I admire most in the common X11-Window-Manager implementations on Linux is the fact that you can move and resize Windows easily without first moving the mouse to a special location of the particular window: Dragging your mouse while holding Alt+(Left-Mouse-Button) will move the window, holding Alt+(Right-Mouse-Button) will resize the window on its nearest edge.

I always missed this little feature when working on Windows. Today I found a script for AutoHotkey, which is a free (GPL) scripting environment for hotkeys. After installing AutoHotkey, simply download and launch the script by double-clicking it and now you’ll have the same behaviour for window movement and resizing as under KDE. Really cool!

AutoHotkey can do a lot more, unfortunately I have not yet had time to try out more.