ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Maximize Your Potential

Up until tonight I was pretty happy with my switch to Thunderbird. I'd migrated over my RSS feeds, for which I was previously using the (admittedly rather cool, as the RSS feeds are almost done at an account level, rather than application level) Outlook 2007 RSS feature, and was busy searching for a replacement calendar application.

My state of mail related bliss was interrupted when I performed a system update involving a new version of GTK. Upon restarting my machine, I discovered that Thunderbird was stuck in full screen mode. Full screen mode involves an application filling the entire screen with no window adornments, so it can't be resized or even moved to another screen. This wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the fact that all the secondary windows (preferences, new messages etc) seem to behave strangely when in full screen mode, often appearing under the main window and requiring a click on the relevant task bar item to get them to show.

After a bit of searching on the web I managed to find a bug entry on the Ubuntu's Launchpad Bugtracker confirming that I wasn't alone. Various Linux installs I've used in the past have allowed me to push "Alt-F11" to toggle  full screen mode, but that didn't seem to be enabled on my Ubuntu 8.04 install.

Figuring that it was an issue that could probably be solved by playing with some window manager settings, I went poking about in the CompizConfig Settings Manager. I found some interesting shortcut configurations under "Window Management > Extra WM Actions", one of them being a shortcut to "Toggle Fullscreen", which was disabled.

In about two seconds I had set this up to use the familiar "Alt-F11". I then tried it out on Thunderbird and my problem was solved. No more forced full screen mode. Now I could drag that little window around to my heart's content! Even better, I could now jump in and out of full screen mode for any application I wanted. I'm going to have to do a bit more digging in the Compiz settings to see what other useful features I can find.