The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:51 UTC (Tue) by jku (subscriber, #42379)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by dvhart
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I can't stand those massive window decorations - I really don't understand it, so much effort has been put into an efficient use of space - particularly vertically lately - why should a half inch be used for the app title and a close button? (MeeGo suffers from this as well

I can't say I'm happy with the result either, but the problem is a tricky one:

There needs to be a standard way to close windows with mouse
This needs to be doable on a totally crappy netbook touchpad so the click target can't be a minuscule dot

With client side decorations and some toolkit magic you could try something more innovative in this area, but with the current tech it's not an easy problem to solve.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:27 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (2 responses)

You have an "icon" (more like a large button) at the top bar with the name of the current application (at least on this Fedora 15 Alpha I am using at the moment); why not put the X button there (like on Firefox's tabs)? Then you could shrink the title bar as much as you want, since it no longer needs to be a mouse target.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:20 UTC (Tue) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]

I was mostly explaining why MeeGo looks like it does (it really has a massive title bar). There is no panel-equivalent there so your suggestion wouldn't work.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:07 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

There's a right-click option on this area to quit application.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:42 UTC (Tue) by dvhart (guest, #19636) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps an option for "Giant-clunky titlebars you can click with your bloody stumps" and "Precision Title Bars" would be a start? ;-) Even just small,medium,large, and stumpy settings would be a big improvement. Also, when maximized, the titlebar is completely redundant and the panel offers an adequately sized means of closing the application. In this case, the titlebar should be eliminated as it adds no value and fights the notion of maximize by consuming a 1/2" of vertical space. The options I mentioned are still desirable for a Desktop environment with a large screen though as apps are rarely maximized (a 26" browser window is a little silly - and a console more so).

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:16 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]

Why have a close button at all? Just make the close action only appear when you punch into Activities overlay - then each mini-window can have a large close button on it and during regular use you can reduce the window frame to just few pixels for the resize handles.