deandra.homeip.net

At work I have a 20" LCD which I attach to my laptop, for more screen real-estate. My laptop has an NVidia video chipset, complete with TwinView and dual-head support, but normally I just run the outputs cloned together, and just use the large display when I'm at my desk.

Last week, however, I had a brief need for more real estate, so I turned off clone mode and ran the displays as seperate viewports to one huge desktop area. Almost immediately, I was disappointed. It seems that Metacity, the default Gnome window manager, uses a particular algorithm to determine where to place newly created windows. Basically, it will place a new window on an empty display if possible. I find this rather difficult to cope with as I was still primarily using the external LCD, and having to constantly drag windows from the smaller internal panel (which sits off to one side on my desk,) over to the big display in front of me got rather tiresome and irritating.

Several people have posted patches on the internet that will change the behaviour of Metacity to something more intelligent, like "place the window on the display where the mouse cursor is", but I didn't feel like patching source and rebuilding packages. Then I came across this page, which describes an alternative: Compiz. Compiz provides more options to control window placement, including the one I was looking for (which places the window on the display where the mouse cursor is, which is more in line with how I use my workstation.) However, Compiz also does a bunch of other things, like being a full compositing window manager making use of the capabilities of modern OpenGL hardware. This enables things like 3d animations when switching windows and desktops (mapping your four desktops onto the sides of a cube and rotating the cube to switch between them,) and animations when moving, resizing, or minimizing windows.

Rather than try to describe to you what Compiz looks like, I'll mention that there are several demo videos on YouTube that show Compiz in action.

If you want to try it out, Debian users can find a HOWTO on The Debian Wiki. There are some modifications that need to be made to your X config that are specific to the video chipset you're using. The only gotcha I ran into was that you need to start the CompizConfig and enable some of the Window Management plugins before your title bars and window decorations will appear.