Tip: Disable Compiz hot corner

Did you ever reached for the window close and have Compiz display all open windows? Well to me it happened one time too many until I decided I wanted to disable that "feature".

The culprit is the Compiz's scale plugin and the initiate_edge option which initiates Compiz's Window Picker.

However there a couple of ways of disabling the hot corner or assigning another corner than the default top right corner:

1. Issue the appropriate gconftool-2 command
2. Install and run gconf-editor
3. Or install and use ccsm

As methods 2 and 3 imply installing further packages or even enabling a new repository (method 3), I'll explain how to use gconftool-2 to achieve our goal.

To disable the hot corner:

1. $ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/compiz/plugins/scale/allscreens/options/initiate_edge Disabled

If you like to hot corner "feature" and would like to move it to the top left corner:

1. $ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/compiz/plugins/scale/allscreens/options/initiate_edge TopLeft

To change the hot corner to the bottom left corner:

1. $ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/compiz/plugins/scale/allscreens/options/initiate_edge BottomLeft

You can also change the hot corner to the bottom right corner:

1. $ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/compiz/plugins/scale/allscreens/options/initiate_edge BottomRight

To re-enable the default hot corner to the top right corner:

1. $ gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/compiz/plugins/scale/allscreens/options/initiate_edge TopRight

This procedure was executed under CentOS 6.2 thus being applicable to Scientific Linux and RHEL however it can also applied to other Unix-like distributions.