Re: Suggestion: Remove the Window Title Bar

[Aurélien Naldi <aurelien naldi gmail com>]

On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org> wrote:
>> * I LOVE the fact that unity hides the title bar for maximized windows
>> and I think gnome-shell should do something similar.
>
> It is something that designers are considering. There are still a lot of
> open questions, but I think it's fairly safe to say that we won't
> "merge" the titlebar with the top bar as Unity does (e.g. window
> controls won't appear in the top bar), but rather hide it completely.

as the title bar already has only the close button (by default), I
guess it makes sense. Yet having something change next to the
application name would make sense, to make sure it doesn't feel like a
bug and hint that the window can be unmaximized by dragging it back
down. I'm sure the specific details would need some tweaking, just
saying that I would like the general idea of hiding the title bar.

>> * As the main focus was about the menu bar, I have to say that I like
>> the unity behaviour for maximized windows, but I hate it for other
>> wondows, having to make sure the right one is focussed and move to the
>> top is cumbersome.
>
> I don't think we want to do that, except for "global" application
> options which should appear in the application menu (the one with the
> lonely "quit" action). In fact, there's the feeling that many
> applications could do without a menu bar to begin with (obviously not
> LibreOffice/Gimp, but pretty much anything "less complex")[0][1]

+1, but we still have a lot of applications which waste vertical space
with menu bar, so anything that can reduce this loss would be good for
me.

>> * merge the menu bar into the title bar: we get pretty much the same
>> behaviour as unity for maximized windows, but something much more sane
>> for other windows.
>
> This has the potential of reducing the draggable titlebar area to zero,
> so I don't think it is a very compelling option :-)
> However, if an application's menu "bar" is reduced to a single toolbar
> button (similar to the menu buttons found in Firefox/Chromium), it might
> indeed make sense to move it into the titlebar (ignoring for a moment
> that it would be far from trivial to implement it).


About the dragable area: one can ensure that we always have some space
before and after the menu, and if too many menus are here, hide them
beneath a "+" button.
I think most of the underlying tech is here already: unity use a
protocol through which the applications describes its menu. Then it is
up to the shell to decide how to organize them.
I'm not fond of the "all menus merged into a button" approach (except
for google chrome which is brilliant): it feels harder to navigate for
me. It is a good solution to overcome the lack of horizontal space but
should only be used in this case.

Of course I am also all for working inside applications to get smaller
menus or no menus at all when it makes sense.

Best regards.

-- 
Aurélien Naldi