Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Gutsy, Compiz oddity

I got tired of Gentoo on my installed laptop, so I dove in for the Gutsy RC instead. I like the changes from Feisty, but if there's one thing that seriously bugs me, it's the alt-tab/application switcher functionality. A lot of times I use alt-tab/alt-shift-tab for quick switching, but Compiz seems to like to do all sorts of flash fade, opacity, etc. effects on it, which is rather distracting. I turned up the brightness to 100% to stop the fading, and it's less distracting, but not by much.

For some reason, the beta also shipped with alt-shift-tab broken (switch to previous window in the list). CompizConfig wasn't very helpful in letting me bind it, either, so I looked to gconf-editor to solve my problems. Funny enough, there was an entry under apps.config.plugins.switcher.allscreens.options named prev_key that was set to alt-shift-tab. Strange. There was also a prev_button entry that was set to "Disabled", so I changed that to "Tab" and it works now. It's rather odd that both fields exist. I think prev_key should be the proper name (obviously I'm not alone, since someone set it instead of prev_buttom), since there's a next_key and no next_button. It's also odd that I couldn't figure out how to set the shortcut in CompizConfig. Perhaps I'm just stupid.

4 comments:

Luke said...

I've been running compiz and gutsy for a while now and they fix new problems like that every day. Keep in mind your running a beta release of a distro with and even more beta piece of software.

Anyway, I like hot corners to switch desktops but I can't seem to get that to work in even gconf.

Anonymous said...

IT'S SO CUTE :D

http://gauvain.tuxfamily.org/blog/images/xubuntu_logo.png

Anonymous said...

Well, Gutsy has been out of beta for a long time, but Compiz STILL does the distracting flashing. Unfortunately, if you turn the app switcher off, you lose all app switching functionality >(.

saiyr said...

Yeah, there's ways to somewhat reduce the flashing effect. I just turned off Compiz instead for the normal alt-tab switcher, since I couldn't figure out if there was a way to change only that (my guess is no, if it's anything like the way Vista's Aero/classic themes work).