GNOME

Internal links

• GNOME Calls

Sloppy focus and Alt+Tab

(An issue as of 2024-09-25, but I may be behind.) The issue is that I can’t always properly “Alt+Tab” window switch using the keyboard when sloppy focus is enabled. Like, because the mouse doesn’t move when selecting a window with the keyboard, the focus immediately reverts to wherever the mouse is pointing. Maybe sloppy focus (or “focus follows mouse”) is only available through GNOME Tweaks, but I’ve been using since I used FVWM.

Windows getting rearranged when adding/removing displays

When I plug in a display, windows from other workspaces all basically get grouped into one. This issues is mentioned on this Reddit post and on this Discourse post (that does not have any responses and is closed).

I’m trying to reproduce this on 2024-02-15 with GNOME 45.2, but I can’t exactly figure out what’s happening. Like, not all windows will switch workspaces if you just add or remove a display repeatedly. Maybe something about the lifetime of the window affects whether it “remembers” its workspace. I also noticed that my Emacs windows (or “frames” in Emacs terminology) got rearranged more often than Firefox, so maybe applications have an influence? I wonder if the following settings have an influence:

• I used a fixed number of workspaces (10), instead of dynamically allocating them (/org/gnome/mutter/dynamic-workspaces = false)
• I’ve set “Workspaces on primary display only” (/org/gnome/mutter/workspaces-only-on-primary = true)

Application definitions

I was trying to find the command for GNOME Console (tl;dr: It’s “kgx”), but I didn’t know where the application entry was defined. To find it, I looked in the “XDG_DATA_DIRS” environment variable and found “/run/current-system/sw/share/applications” (which is specific to NixOS). Then looking in “org.gnome.Console.desktop” I found the “Exec” line specifying the command.

Looking glass

There’s a pretty cool inspector called “looking glass” (which is documented on wiki.gnome.org) that lets you inspect different parts of Clutter (the compositor/window manager) and also lets you run JavaScript (GJS). You access it by going to the run dialog (by default Alt+F2) and then typing “lg”. It pulls up something like a quake shell, which you close by pressing “Esc” at the evaluator.

Gsettings

Most normal settings are done via “Settings” (gnome-control-center). Less typical settings can be modified with GNOME Tweaks (gnome-tweaks), which I think sometimes needs to be installed separately.

Manual settings changes are done on “gsettings” key value pairs, which I think can depend on the backend. The backend I use (which I believe is typical) is “dconf”. gsettings store more than just GNOME desktop settings, other applications can also use it to store settings. gsettings can be viewed in a GUI with dconf-editor. If you want to save all user-modified keys use dconf dump /org/gnome/ (or change the path to / for all keys).

Here are some places some settings are stored.