Home / ubuntu / Questions / 8498
Accepted
Malabarba
Asked: 2010-10-21 07:09:33 +0800 CST

How can I make the draggable window border thicker, without changing the appearance?

  • 772

When you want to resize a window in gnome (as well as in other systems) you can click-and-hold at the window's border and than drag it. The problem is (and do correct me if I'm wrong here) that the draggable border is just a couple of pixels thick in gnome. That tends to be a little frustrating, and contributes to my wrist pains from using the mouse, as it requires very careful movement of the mouse.

How can I change the thickness of the area I can click in order to resize a window? I don't want to increase the appearance of the window border, I'm not talking about eye candy here. I want to fine tune this functionality where I can resize a window by dragging its border.

Is there a setting somewhere that will change this?

gnome window-manager

3 Answers

  1. Change the following parameters in the appropriate Metacity XML file.

    Ambiance's theme is located in /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

    The folowing parameters change the width of the borders and consequently the width of the re-size area:

    "<distance name="left_width" value="1"/>"
"<distance name="right_width" value="1"/>"
"<distance name="bottom_height" value="1"/>"

    By default they are set to "1", but I found that changing them to "4" doesn't change the appearance very drastically, but makes it very much easier to re-size using the mouse.

    • 24
  2. Best Answer

    You can't.

    This is a three year old bug with no solution.

    You either have to use a different theme or do as I have done and give up trying and use keys to resize windows.

    Mini Howto:

    Alt + F8 to start resizing. Use arrow keys to resize.

    Pressing Return will save the resize, escape will revert you back.

    The bug report is here and has hundreds of comments on it and thirteen duplicate bug reports on launchpad alone.

    • 12
    • 0