Make window resizing easier out of the box

Thoughts & Feedback
#21

So you have:

Metacity on it own - works
Compiz 0.9.* (GPU compositor) - works

#22

Not entirely: Metacity with no compositing does not work either.

#23

Well it is not drawing a shadow then of course.

To make the resize border area wider, without physically making the border wider is going to cause problems if you want to click on something in the window close to the border. Metacity does this in the titlebar which is the only sensible place it can do it.

edit: you’re right of course though, in that the resize area could fall slighlty outside the window regardless if there is a shadow or not.

#24

Yep it would be good if it’s wider than 1px.

#25

I can confirm that enabling Metacity compositor instead of Marco helps a lot in this regard (when using the “software compositor” option). I get maybe 6-7 pixels of “handle” to grab hold of for resizing in the “shadow area”.

So, is changing the compositor the preferred / onlyy approach to getting better ability of resizing windows?

Any news or insights on how the move to GTK3 changes this issue?

#26

Thank you. Making that wider did the trick, and I can’t really see a difference.

#27

Time to bump this topic again: 17.10 beta 2 is out, and when trying it out in a VM I could only get a decent resize area when selecting Compiz.
Both the Marco SW compositor and Marco+Compton still have the old issue.
I hope this can get some attention for the next LTS release.

#28

March 2021 and this still seems to be an issue with out of the box Ubuntu MATE. The keyboard shortcut is Alt Right-Button drag, if anyone is still reading this.

#29

Please see - Larger Window Resize target area for Mouse Dragging? where I remark on how easy it became to size windows with the advent of MATE version 19.10 and all newer versions.