Various patches have existed for at least a decade but every time they're proposed some issue is found and they're not merged so the goal posts shift from 'just write your own patch' to 'just become a Gnome maintainer' with no guarantees that you'll get the assistance you need to implement the feature or whether it'll even be merged, and fair enough, the Gnome team really don't owe anybody anything, but in that case getting annoyed that the community keeps referencing a 17 year old issue is just a natural part of the exchange.

That seems excessively dismissive; it's hardly a dead meme while the issue remains open, boring only to the GNOME developers who have decided that little things like what users want is irrelevant, annoying only because it's been a decade with zero attempt at a solution. It's nice that you never use this feature, but unhelpful to others who do. And yes, it's terribly generous of them to be willing to consider merging a fix if someone else does the work.

> we just need one person who cares about this feature

Uh no. There have been at least 3 separate attempts at implementing this. One of them actually lives as a fork on github, and it works. None of them have been merged. The gtk devs don't care.

Why are people so dismissive about this? It's a significant usability problem among many, many others that gnome has.

It should be annoying that the issue keeps coming up.

It's not a 'meme' that gnome lacks an extremely basic feature that is incredibly common in other GUIs.