Hi,
I need to suppress or re-allocate the "Alt + mouseclick" behaviour on my Debian Wheezy system so that it available for Inkscape.

At the moment, as I understand it, this combination is not getting past the window manager; which uses it for moving windows around.

I've read that metacity is the default WM for Gnome and that it should be possible to re-allocate "Alt+click" to the "meta" (Windows) key via gconftool:

$gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/mouse_button_modifier '<Super>'

This changes the key value fine but the behaviour is unaltered.

I then tried: $wmctrl -m
Which told me I was using "Mutter" as WM!!!
Now I'm getting confused and would appreciate hearing from anyone who has more understanding of this problem... .
Battus.

Wow i didnt even know there was such a thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutter_...dow_manager%29 thanks for the heads up

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the the Wikipedia link to "Mutter" @fogpipe. Interesting!

It seems pretty certain, then, that I have Mutter as Window Manager. I did a straightforward (net)install of Debian Wheezy, last April (just before it became stable ) choosing Gnome as my desktop environment and have changed very little since.

Now to find out how to change (or supress) that pesky "Alt + left-click" combination for Mutter... (mutter, mutter, mutter...)

Battus.

P.S. The answer is as follows:
In recent GNOME versions the GNOME Shell window manager is Mutter.
Configuration is accessed from the command line through gsettings, with Linux using the dconf backend.
To change the setting through gsettings, use:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences mouse-button-modifier "'<Super>'"

I found a couple of other ways too but the above is the one I used and it worked.
Now if I want to slide floating windows about I can use "Super + click" and "Alt+click" is freed up for use in Inkscape.
The changes takes effect immediately.
B.