ARRGH! Metacity is killing me.

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Fri, Apr 30, 2004 at 02:28:45PM +0930, Iain Buchanan wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-04-30 at 14:12, Andrew Farris wrote:
> > 
> > You should investigate XFCE4 which does a very nice job of mixing 'light
> > weight' configurable managers with 'gnome-esque' niceties.
> 
> really?  last time I tried out xfce4 (fedora core 1) I could only get
> the gnome-panel on one workspace.

This, I believe, is a "feature" which makes a number of workspaces
in a gnome-panel a property of metacity.  In other words - broken
as designed.  To get around that in sawfish I came up with the
following code for ~/.sawfish/rc

;; set a number of workspaces to what was recorded
;; by "Workspace Switcher Preferences"
(set-number-of-workspaces
 (let* ((str (make-string-output-stream))
        (proc (make-process str)))
   (call-process proc nil "gconftool-2"
                 "-g" "/apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces")
   (let ((var (get-output-stream-string str)))
     (let ((nvar
             (string-looking-at "[0-9]+" var)
             (string->number (substring var (match-start) (match-end)))))
       (cond
        ((numberp nvar) nvar)
        (t 4)))))) ;; if we do not know any better then make this 4

Of course a much simpler '(set-number-of-workspaces 6)', for
example, would do the job too but changing that value would have
to be done with an editor.  All that extra code is to squeeze that
info out of metacity.  How to do that something similar for xfce4
I have no idea at the moment.

   Michal