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Removing a major Compiz annoyance

Sep 14, 2006  By Nicholas Petreley

As much as I love the 3D Compiz/Cgwd, there is one thing I can do without: Wobbly menus. When you pull down or pop-up a wobbly menu, hitting the right menu selection is like target practice. It's even worse if you have to drill down to a sub-sub-sub menu selection because each sub-menu wobbles, too. Here's how to turn off this behavior in the most recent installation of Compiz.

Use the csm program to customize the behavior of plugins. Select Wobbly Windows from the left panel. Look for the Map Windows Types group box. Uncheck PopupMenu, Unknown and DropdownMenu. That's all there is to it. You can uncheck Menu, too, if it's checked on your system. It isn't checked by default on mine. Here's a quick screen shot of the csm configuration.

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Kwin?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Thu, 09/14/2006 - 09:22.

Hi! Are you running XGL/Compiz in KDE with Kwin Window Decorator? If so, please let me know how, 'cause I have to use cgwd in KDE, which is not so stable.

Thanks.

Kwin vs. Cgwd

Nicholas Petreley's picture
Submitted by Nicholas Petreley on Thu, 09/14/2006 - 09:47.

As far as I know, the existing Kwin doesn't support Xgl/Compiz. I use cgwd. It is surprisingly stable for me. The only problem I encountered was the fact that the new compiz-start program doesn't do the xmod change, so things like shift-Backspace will kill the X server. Edit /usr/bin/compiz-start and add this line at the end to fix this problem:


xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace Delete"

That will stop the X server from seeming to crash every time you accidentally hit a combination like shift-Backspace.

DontZap

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 09/20/2006 - 02:27.

There's a better way to prevent yourself from killing the X server. Put this directive in your xorg.conf and X will just ignore Alt+Control+Backspace:


Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "true"
EndSection

DontZap: Not the solution

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 09/23/2006 - 04:54.

The DontZap option had no effect for me - only using the xmodmap trick stopped SHIFT+BACKSPACE from killing XGL.

Thanks!

Nicholas Petreley's picture
Submitted by Nicholas Petreley on Wed, 09/20/2006 - 08:51.

I knew there was a setting for xorg.conf to do this, but I couldn't remember what it was. You're right - it's a better way of handling this.

Kwin vs. Cgwd

Nicholas Petreley's picture
Submitted by Nicholas Petreley on Thu, 09/14/2006 - 09:47.

As far as I know, the existing Kwin doesn't support Xgl/Compiz. I use cgwd. It is surprisingly stable for me. The only problem I encountered was the fact that the new compiz-start program doesn't do the xmod change, so things like shift-Backspace will kill the X server. Edit /usr/bin/compiz-start and add this line at the end to fix this problem:


xmodmap -e "keycode 22 = BackSpace Delete"

That will stop the X server from seeming to crash every time you accidentally hit a combination like shift-Backspace.

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