Arch Linux

lycantrophe

Member

Registered: 2010-07-05

Posts: 9

[KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

Hi.

I do not know if topic has been up for discussion, but I wonder if more people shares my view on this.

Kwin has seen a lot of development since KDE4 was initially released, with the latest support of behaving tiling. However there is a function I would love to see implemented in Kwin, and any other WM for that matter, and that is merging the title bar and menu bar.

When I do not move windows around with hotkeys I do so with alt + left click. Which basicly means that the title bar is next to obsolete, as it per now contains (in my case) three small buttons, one icon and a few words. Handy when you need it, but to be fair, rarely used. Chrome solved this problem by placing tabs upon the title bar, along with the max/min/close buttons. That way you preserve the border as well as making it useful, for let's face it, most KDE applications has tabs. In fact, more and more applicaitons all over the board get tab support, so there definetly could be a market here.

Another option is to put the space to use by placing the menu bar there. Take a look at Konsole, for instance, which has TWO bars, and in total uses less than 50% of the space of one.

What do you think?

mento

Member

Registered: 2009-10-15

Posts: 24

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

You can remove the title bar manually (I assigned meta+m) or automatically at program start, while the KDE-menu-bar is easily hided with ctrl+m.

I mean, if I desperately need space I would use fullscreen or I don't want to see a title or menu bar at all. Both methods will give more space. Only if I really need a menu bar all the time, than I would have a really small advantage with that approach, but the rest of the time it is totally needless, like having a big display, being in fullscreen or having no title and menu bar. As I see it, it will give no real advantages and when it has no advantages, but the potential to break the design, the window management and a program itself, I don't want to have it.

A Title/menu-bar would result in a mixture of window management and application management. This is something the kwin developer are not so fond of (just read about client site decorations) and because of that it won't happen in the near future. Additionally, there is a plasma netbook edition to address the space problems on small displays.

Last edited by mento (2010-12-18 13:53:06)

lycantrophe

Member

Registered: 2010-07-05

Posts: 9

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

I am aware of the possibility to completely hide it, but then again, there goes window window buttons. (When I think of it, I mostly use hotkeys anyways, perhaps I should remove them.)

Oh, that is one aspect I didn't think of. I suppose it is not that good an idea, then, since the titlebar is drawn by the WM and the rest by the application itself.

devius

Member

Registered: 2010-11-11

Posts: 22

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

Oh, that is one aspect I didn't think of. I suppose it is not that good an idea, then, since the titlebar is drawn by the WM and the rest by the application itself.

I share your point of view. There is much wasted space. I already disabled the menu bar in dolphin since I can have buttons to do most of the stuff that I may need the menus for. That mix between titlebar and menus could be a bit buggy at first, but I'm sure it wouldn't be an impossible situation. There could be ao option for enabling that behaviour if the application should choose to do so, and if not the classic bahaviour would be used.

Zom

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2007-10-27

Posts: 430

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

It's an interesting idea, I'll give it that. I suppose what you could do is make kwin paint the titlebar over the menubar until you move your mouse over the application name, where it instead shows the menu on hover.

Hacky, and possibly impossible, but it'd let you keep the wm/application split.

The QtCurve kwin decoration has support for adding a "show/hide menubar" button to the titlebar if you don't feel like being hacky.

SteveK

Member

Registered: 2010-06-11

Posts: 80

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=33910

Odaer

Member

Registered: 2010-08-14

Posts: 87

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

Hi.

I do not know if topic has been up for discussion, but I wonder if more people shares my view on this.

Kwin has seen a lot of development since KDE4 was initially released, with the latest support of behaving tiling. However there is a function I would love to see implemented in Kwin, and any other WM for that matter, and that is merging the title bar and menu bar.

When I do not move windows around with hotkeys I do so with alt + left click. Which basicly means that the title bar is next to obsolete, as it per now contains (in my case) three small buttons, one icon and a few words. Handy when you need it, but to be fair, rarely used. Chrome solved this problem by placing tabs upon the title bar, along with the max/min/close buttons. That way you preserve the border as well as making it useful, for let's face it, most KDE applications has tabs. In fact, more and more applicaitons all over the board get tab support, so there definetly could be a market here.

You can sort of get this feature if you use "Automatically group similar windows" in the "Window behavior" menu. When you open a new windows its is placed as a tab in the title bar.
As I understand it, works is going on to give this feature a dbus interface so it can integrate better with the applications intern tabs.

lycantrophe

Member

Registered: 2010-07-05

Posts: 9

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

SteveK: Yes, sort of like that. Tried it, but it lacks some options for customization etc. It's a sweet idea, though, and if I aim for it (perhaps another time), I can get it to work for me.

Odaer: Oh, that was nice, actually. Did not know about it. Although not exactly what I had in mind it certainly will be used from now on.

jorchube

Member

Registered: 2009-04-05

Posts: 57

Re: [KDE][Suggestion] Kwin title bar&menu bar/tab bar merge

You can set kwin to automatically tab similar windows, so, if you disable the "classical per app tabs" two or more windows of the same program are automatically tabbed... and you solve your problem, at least partially