License: GPL
Activity Rating: High
Metacity is a lightweight window manager written by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat. The first version was 2.3, which was released in 2001. It is implemented with the GTK+ 2.x toolkit, and so integrates well with the GNOME 2.x platform. In fact the intention is to remove the traditional separation between window manager and desktop, and present to the user a single desktop interface. This means that the limited configuration options available for Metacity are shown as desktop options, not as Metacity options (although there is an optional "Metacity-setup" panel which conflicts with this approach).
Instead of adding numerous features, Metacity attempts to use good defaults. The author even describes it as "boring", and it doesn't even have a logo!
Here are some screenshots of Metacity:
- From trollet@skynet.be, added in April 2003: This 1600x1200 screenshot (358k) is from an Ultra 10 running Solaris.
- From rfd888@prodigy.net, added in April 2003: This screenshot (162k) shows Metacity running with GNOME 2 on SuSE Linux.
For downloads, themes, and further information see the following sites:
- The official download site is the place to go for the latest release.
- Metacity-setup: a GUI to configure settings in Metacity, such as theme, focus settings, etc.
- Metacity themes at art.gnome.org
- Designing Metacity Themes HOWTO
- Metacity configuration notes
- A collection of Metacity themes from Chile.