The new modal dialogs in GTK/gnome that are nailed to the parent window's center and can't be moved are such unintelligent design. Libreoffice now uses these for the paragraph style editing dialog so now you can't move the dialog anymore to look at the effect of your settings on the actual document. A similar issue happens with the "save as" dialog in many GTK applications. Often you'd want to look at the content of the document to decide on a file name.

#gtk #gnome #ux

#gnome #gtk #UX
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to jaseg

the latching of modal dialogs is done by the window manager, not by the toolkit; it can be disabled by using:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter attach-modal-dialogs false

The reason why it's set to "true" is that people have lost modal dialogs in the window stacking, and since they are modal, the application to which they belong looks "frozen". Ideally, applications should use fewer modal dialogs to begin with, but that was a common pattern 20 years ago, so it takes time to unlearn.

in reply to jaseg

I doubt that, in over 15 years of development, multiple people have missed an "easy" solution, let alone a dozen; but, hey: stranger things have happened.

I did open an issue 6 years ago: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-s…

Needs some design effort.