RE: Gnome Design wishlist

[Megh Parikh <meghjp gmail com>]

For Firefox there's an addon htitle which works smoothly and hides titlebar. (The version on the addons site is a little old and does not work with another addon called MultiFox (multiple profiles like chrome) So I downloaded the second latest version from github which works better. The latest shows some error)

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From: Florian Müllner
Sent: ‎22-‎12-‎2014 23:29
To: Donato Marrazzo
Cc: gnome-shell-list gnome org
Subject: Re: Gnome Design wishlist

On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 7:08 PM, Donato Marrazzo
<donato marrazzo gmail com> wrote:
> Top Bar: unfortunately somebody decided that 16/9 screen are good not just
> for TV but even for PC and Tablets (very very bad idea). What do you think
> to save vertical space using a side bar?

Not much, to be honest. It is true that vertical space is more
precious than horizontal space with widescreen resolutions, but there
are other factors that need to be considered. In particular, rotating
text affects its readability, and most scripts do use a horizontal
layout[0]. This matters less for a fixed string like "Activities"
because the user will eventually recognize it without actually reading
it, but it is a concern for varying elements like the date and
application title. Both of those concerns could be considered at the
same time by keeping text laid out horizontally in a sidebar, but at
least IMHO, this would take away a disproportional amount of
horizontal space (27px vertical space vs. >= 150px horizontal space).
It is also worth noting that none of the major user interfaces uses a
vertical pattern here (at least by default) - Windows, Mac OS, KDE,
XFCE and even Unity (with its declared goal of preserving vertical
space) all use a horizontal bar at the top or bottom.


> Window Title bars when maximized: for the same reason, please save space!

If you are talking about removing the titlebar altogether for
maximized windows (à la maximus/Unity) rather than reducing
padding/spacing in the default theme, then no. This was discussed at
length in the past, but there was consensus that the result was pretty
poor for applications that were not designed with this pattern in mind
(in particular menubars); that's why it was made opt-in by
applications[1], and later evolved into GTK+'s client-side
decorations, where merging titlebar, menubar and toolbar into a single
element saves more vertical space than simply removing the titlebar
would[2] - regardless of the window state.
Obviously none of this helps with applications that are not adopting
any of those patterns, but after discarding removing the titlebar for
all windows (as explained above), there's nothing we can do on the
GNOME side - we are not a distributor like Canonical, so patching Qt,
LibreOffice, Firefox etc. to merge a window's menubar with the top bar
(at least when maximized) is simply not possible.
That said, I would probably take a patch for an option to force the
hide-titlebar-when-maximized property for all (server-side decorated)
windows, but it won't be the default.


[0] True for Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew; looking at
http://www.baidu.com/, it appears to be at least acceptable for
Chinese as well ...
[1] https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkWindow.html#gtk-window-set-hide-titlebar-when-maximized
[2] http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you-space-since-2009-or-so/
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