viewports and the workspace switcher

[Marshall Perrin <mperrin heartofgold bantha org>]

I'm running sawfish with GNOME 2.2 on a Debian "testing" system
(sawfish package 1.3+cvs2003102; gnome-panel 2.2.2.2-2, if you want the
gory details...)

I've edited my .sawfishrc to enable the use of viewports instead of
workspaces, since I like to be able to span windows across multiple
viewports or drag them between virtual desktops with the mouse. By and
large this works great and I've happily replicated the functionality I had
back in GNOME 1.4. However, there are two minor annoyances I've noticed.
I don't know if these are sawfish bugs or gnome-panel bugs.

1) Viewports are drawn in the pager with the wrong proportions!
They're much narrower than the actual proportions of my screen. In other
words, if you'll pardon some bad ascii art, the workspace switcher looks
like this:

+-+-+-+
| | | |
| | | |
+-+-+-+
| | | |
| | | |
+-+-+-+


and I'd rather it look like this:

+--+--+--+
|  |  |  |
+--+--+--+
|  |  |  |
+--+--+--+


All my windows in the workspace switcher are scrunched up into narrow
versions of their true selves. Furthermore, in some cases, windows which
are near the edges of a viewport are drawn in the wrong part of the
switcher. (For instance, this happens if I put a gkrellm running right
next to the right edge of my screen - it ends up in the workspace switcher
as if it were on the left side of one viewport over from where it really
is.


2) You can't drag windows around between viewports in the pager. It
will happily let you start dragging a window, but will fail to let you put
it down on a new viewport. It works just fine to drag to another
workspace, however, which makes this all the more annoying.


Does anyone have any tips on resolving these annoyances? I'm happy to hack
on some code, though admittedly it's been more than a few years since I
last used Lisp - but I'm not really sure whether the problems are with
sawfish or with the gnome panel task switcher.

Thanks,

 - Marshall