Bring Pidgin’s window into front focus when there’s an inbound IM

I was talking to a co-worker about Pidgin not coming into focus when there’s a new, inbound IM. The Pidgin window used to come into focus, front and center, when I was running Ubuntu/Gnome and when running OpenSUSE/KDE, but when I upgraded my office desktop to Ubuntu/Unity it stopped behaving this way. My co-worker noticed the same behavior with Fedora17/Gnome. A new IM would come in, but the Pidgin IM window would remain in the background, hidden, unseen and unread.

I thought “There has to be a setting that controls this,” and there is…

  • Bring up Pidgin’s Buddy List
  • Click Tools > Plugins
  • Locate the Message Notification plugin and highlight it
  • At the bottom of the Plugins window is a Configure Plugin button. Click it
  • Under Notification Methods check both Raise conversation window and Present conversation window
  • Click Close

That’s it. The next time someone IM’s you, your Pidgin Conversation will pop up in the center of your screen, in front of all of your other windows.

Hope you find this useful.

Getting rid of self-resizing windows in Ubuntu Linux 12.04

I’ve been using a pre-release “daily build” installation of Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin” and noticed that current default for Gnome is for windows to resize themselves when you get close to the edge of the screen. I have two 22″ widescreen monitors and if I moved a window near the top edge it would maximize and fill the screen. If I moved a window to any edge Gnome would decide for me that what I “really” wanted was to enlarge the window to fill half the screen or do something else equally annoying. This might work well on a 10″ netbook screen, but on dual 22″ monitors it’s annoying as hell.

I tracked the problem down to a setting in Compiz, the screen compositing tool used by many Linux desktop environments, so if you’re using KDE or Unity with Compiz and you’re finding self-resizing windows irritating this fix should work for you as well.

To fix the problem you need to install the CompizConfig Settings Manager, so fire up Synaptic Package Manager and search for “compizconfig-settings-manager” and install it.

Once installed, if you’re using Gnome go to Applications > System Tools > Preferences and click “CompizConfig Settings Manager” to start the tool.

Scroll down to “Window Management.”

Uncheck “Place Windows”.

Leave “Grid” checked, but click the word “Grid” to get the Grid settings, then go to the Edges tab and change all Resize Actions to “None”.

Click Back.

Now your desktop will do what you tell it to do, rather than second-guessing you and doing something that you do not want.

One thing that you can now do (that you probably really don’t want) is to have the title bar (and it’s controls) move off-screen, which means you can’t move or resize the window unless you Alt-right-click on it. To fix that issue:

Check the “Put” plugin.

Click the word “Put” to bring up more options, go to the “Misc Options” tab, check “Avoid Offscreen”, click Back, then Close Window.

Hope you find this useful.