Removing decorations in Metacity

I switched to gnome and I miss one wonderful feature of kwin. By combining always on top and remove decoration, kwin allow to transform any window into a kind of post-it embedded into an other window. For example I use it to add an xterm in Netbeans. I don’t know any other window manager than kwin being able to hide decoration with a hot key.

From Devil’s pie source code I found that it was possible to remove decoration using the _MOTIF_WM_HINTS window property. It first tried it with the xprop command, but I had some trouble to handle the maximized window case. Then I found the Ralf Neupert wmctrl patch. I used it as inspiration to write my wmctrl patch, which toggle decoration and ensure that maximized window spread on the whole screen. See the patch bellow.

Metacity have a built-in support for binding custom action to shortcut. In gconf-editor:

• /apps/metacity/keybinding_commands/command_1 = wmctrl -r :ACTIVE: -B
• /apps/metacity/global_keybindings/run_command_1 = <mod4>H