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Should Apps Replace Title Bars with Header Bars? (gnome.org)
Gnome contributor Tobias Bernard is on a crusade against title bars -- "the largely empty bars at the top of some application windows [that] contain only the window title and a close button." Instead he wants to see header bars -- "a newer, more flexible pattern that allows putting window controls and other UI elements in the same bar." Tobias Bernard writes:
Header bars are client-side decorations (CSD), which means they are drawn by the app rather than the display server. This allows for better integration between application and window chrome. All GNOME apps (except for Terminal) have moved to header bars over the past few years, and so have many third-party apps. However, there are still a few holdouts.
He's announcing the CSD Initiative, "an effort to get apps (both GNOME and third-party) to drop title bars and adopt GNOME-style client-side decorations... The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we'll have to do."
He's announcing the CSD Initiative, "an effort to get apps (both GNOME and third-party) to drop title bars and adopt GNOME-style client-side decorations... The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we'll have to do."
- Talk to the maintainers and convince them that this is a good idea
- Do the design work of adapting the layout and make mockups
- Figure out what is required at a technical level
- Actually implement the new layout and get it merged
Implementation is already in progress for Firefox, though it has not yet been started for other high-priority apps like LibreOffice, GNOME Terminal, and Skype. "If you want to help with any of the above tasks," writes Tobias, "come talk to us on #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix."
keeping it real, m'ladies
"I must make my mark by fucking up a user interface that's worked fine for thirty damned years!!!! Because I'm soooo much smarter than everyone else!!!"
The sad thing is, the dolts running Gnome might agree with this simpering jackass. Hell, can't pass up a chance to cram in more bloat!
Since there is empty space at the top for a title bar, other applications have been designed around that.
For example, Microsoft Remote Desktop puts a server bar at the top-center of the window.
Then there's Winamp, which can be sized down to be the size of a title bar and be kept always-on-top.
And the chance that I'll have any kind of consistent interface, when thousands of app-writers are rolling their own? ZERO!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
If you want something changed, I think open source has far more access to developers then any other OS. Why not contact people working with Gnome to suggest such changes? If you have and nobody seems to care, maybe your a small minority in wanting this change. If this is the case then I guess you deal with it.
There is a distinction between controls for an app and controls for a window manager.
These are two different concepts and should not be muddled up.
Similarly, should an app be able to bind Alt+Tab for its own use? No, of course not.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
... UI design becomes non trivial, if we look at how complex apps who have thousands of functions hidden or burried that even normal UI's can't handle. There's tonnes of stuff in many apps today that most people don't even know exists largely because it's buried in the lookup of the help menu.
UI consistency does matter if your app is simple then you can probably get away with it but you need to be able to read what something does at a glance.
If anything the support by a Gnome 3.0 contributor should be taken as a warning against. I had to find replacements for all Gnome tools I used during the migration to Gnome 3, including Gnome itself. I couldn't find half the settings I used in Gedit and I distinctly remember that the UI got more bloated while offering less than before. They need more space for their UI? Go back to Gnome 2.0 and drop that ugly UX for a usable UI.
This is like when it is set above the ribbon.
I like my title bars and hate apps that think they're too important to cooperate with my window manager.
The GNOME UI people have apparently become addicted to changing well defined behavior in favor of some crazy shit. GNOME 3 caused a mass exodus of developers because of this, so all they have left is the people who think it's acceptable to completely change the UI whenever they feel like it. This is descending into the death throes of GNOME.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No.
But only if we crown him with many testicle furs!
so original !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
have you ever tried to reposition a firefox or chrome window that is full of tabs?
what happens when the window manager uses BeOS style titlebars?
what happens to my webex/remote-desktop overlays when there is no empty space for them to live over?
somewhat related: have you ever tried to resize a window that does not have obvious resize control handles? or have you ever tried to *not* resize a window when the non-obvious control 'areas' take your click instead of the drag-to-select-text that you intended?
and don't get me started on scrollbars that appear and disappear depending on where you put your cursor instead of what the content is.
So, Tobias Bernard is trying to convince everyone to join his CSD Initiative
"tl;dr: Let’s get rid of title bars." he says. And what is the "tl" in this case ?
This isn't "too long". It's too short and illogical. "Title" is already the term for what he's trying to say so, he might simply be trying to say that applications don't need a title. So, I wonder he he's using a title ("Introducing the CSD Initiative") at his own article. My take: he's an idiot.
This is exactly why I quit using Gnome 20 years ago. Breaking UI conventions that work perfectly fine and destroying consistency.
Why in god's name would I want apps to cram even more useless controls in my face? A window needs two things: a title so I know WTH it is, and min/max/close buttons. That's it. Now Gnome is taking that away? Just for 20 pixels of real estate ?
Anyone calling themselves a "modern UI developer" should be tarred and feathered. Apple went to flat controls and borderless buttons. Microsoft made Office 2016 flatter than Kansas and decided light gray text controls on bright white background was somehow legible. Gnome has been lost in their own rabbit hole for decades. All of it making interfaces less intuitive and harder to use. A pox on all their houses.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
And now they are trying to push their crap on to others?
Windows 10 is trying to change the styles, too, and all you get is half the applications use one look, half use the other: "Here's a slick new settings interface! Oh... you want to actually do something Useful? Here's the old one." Most users don't care.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
That will not change no matter how many years pass. Yes, there is TWM. Teal goodness and hasn't changed for decades. I prefer TWM over GNOME any day, but systemD forced me into proprietary OSes.Don't mention BSD, it's dying.
Gnome is a horrible experience. Why would we want to propagate it to non gnome apps?
Remove some or all of the text menus. Instead, make every square millimeter of screen estate "hot" and sensitive to the mouse, as triggers for the actions removed from the menus, and for actions that never had any UI (e.g., rotating text or reversing them as if seen in a mirror, in some of Microsoft's products).
Modern UI design is often more and more "hide and seek". URLs are hidden, menus disappear, scroll bars appear and disappear. Sometimes, one has the impression, UI designers wanted to play a prank. Adding more stuff in the title bar can be a good thing. But first a rant: I have worked on clunky user interfaces before in my life like VMS workstations, DOS, GEM on Atari or old Mac OS or even gopher browsers pre Mosaic, but the trend of "hide stuff" is driving me nuts. OS X by default does not show the hard drive, nor scroll bars. On browsers, both phone or desktop, things like URLs disappear. It is now cool to hide important things in cryptic places like three dots on the upper right corner in chrome. Or then windows which like to become full screen or adjust their position on their own. I have experienced less frustration writing from scratch a printer driver on an Atari than solving the trivial task to find the print button on a modern browser. Fortunately, it is in most cases still possible to configure things but it often needs first some searching maybe even looking up manuals. I understand that there are two forces in UI design, one which wants to hide things so that it is elegant and beautiful and so that the complexity is hidden and users protected from screwing things up. This is the "passenger" point of view, which mostly applies to consuming stuff. And then there is the need of speed and convenience, which asks for putting many things on the radar so that they can be accessed and found quickly. This is the "pilot" point of view, which mostly applies when producing stuff. The CSD initiative could be a good thing. I for myself like the title bar information. It tells me for each window, where and what it is. Let the user be able to configure it. And in general, be very gentle with changes. Even small modifications can disrupt work flows.
you speak of.
Top of my FF 58.0 [64 bit] reads File Edit View.........
No guarantee they don't kill it off in the next update like Chrome did.
But there again I dropped SnoopZilla a few years ago.
On the one hand, maximum function in minimum real-estate is a good idea.
On the other hand, GNOME has become an ungodly mess and Linux' reputation for stability and speed has greatly suffered.
Get GNOME to conform to NASA's Power of Ten rules and then let's talk.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
he compared his new style with osx, but he seems to forget that osx has a window' menu bar on the top of the screen, which makes it easier for any application to be more fluid/integrated with the OS ui
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
....allows putting window controls and an ad-slinger.....
I understand his complaint. Screens are generally short, so title bars consume valuable real estate on the screen. There are other ways to fix this. Popup title bars are one option. What about side bars instead? Screens are typically wider now thanks to HDTV aspect ratios.
And no, we should not cross the API barrier between the applications and window managers. Why do we waste space in glibc with the syscall trampolines? Applications could just code this directly.
This reeks of Lennart Poettering-levels of arrogance and stupidity.
At worst put very limited application information into the GUI header for a page. Letting the application play with the header is inviting all sorts of application manipulation and injection vectors into the GUI which is very bad. The GUI owns the header and should maintain full control.
watch my video - https://youtu.be/dBbmVJXGc_M subscribe
on the itty bitty bars at the top of my window on my 1080p monitor. I don't want clicking 'new tab' to feel like sniping somebody from across a map. I do, however, want hierarchical menus (File, Edit, View) that follow a consistent pattern making it easy to find things. Whoever came up with the Ribbon should be launched into space and fired out of an airlock.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Heh. I remember the KDE vs Gnome wars when KDE was accused of everything but the kitchen sink. While Gnome was the paradigm of minimalism, even thought the spatial browser got a lot of hate.
... I'd much rather see someone go on a crusade to have apps remember their last window size and location on the desktop, so that i don't have to resize and re-location the window each time I open an app on GNU/Linux. MS Windows has been doing this for decades, why is GNU/Linux so far behind? Is there a patent in the way?
I do know what you mean. But to me it feels more like "duck and cover". Yeah, ditched Gnome for that a looong while ago.
As Mate Desktop has been progressing, they've been slowly replacing Gnome 3 apps (things like certain settings apps, the NetworkManager GUI, etc) with ones more consistent with the Mate Desktop, which is traditional and has regular window title bars.
I for one never use the title bar for moving a window. I exclusively use Alt-click to move a window from anywhere in the window. However I want title bars because they distinguish one window from another using the color theme of window decorations that I want. I can make them small and efficient use of space. Gnome is what is making server-side title bars so big and wasteful. Also with HeaderBar CSDs it's very difficult to distinguish between windows as the headerbar isn't distinct form the body of other windows. This is something I've always had a hard time with on Mac, especially in recent years.
The other thing I use title bars for is to roll up or shade the window, which I use nearly every day, particularly with terminal windows! I think Gnome 3 has the ability to shade apps, even with CSD, but I'm not sure. I saw at least one bug report that said it's no longer possible. But again, where would you click to do that? CSD header bars don't offer consistency in where you can click. Do you click on what looks like a title? blank space between buttons? Hard to know.
With Linux desktops we used to celebrate diversity and choice. Now it appears Gnome 3 would be perfectly happy to be the only choice (getting rid of KDE, Mate, etc), and have all apps be Gnome 3 apps. Why would Blender ever want to integrate into Gnome 3's header bar? Blender doesn't need to look integrated, nor would it benefit it to do so. In fat it might even harm it. Better to look different and remind users that they are operating in a specific environment with a specific methodology that must be learned.
How sane are the KDE developers, and is there a good KDE distribution with a Cinnamon-style desktop interface?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Also,
What happens when an application becomes unresponsive and you can no longer move or minimize the window?
What happens when you use this with a program like Synergy and your mouse moves off the side of the screen while dragging a window? (Chrome freaks out when this happens.)
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Most applications in MATE don't seem to be afflicted with this nonsense. I sure hope it stays that way!
Stop messing with things for the sake of change. Provide a defendable set of use cases showing how it benefits usability to the end user. They are your customer whether they pay you money or not. Even if it is Open source software, users are your customers and without them, your software has no point to exist.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
1) Open up Edge on Win10
2) open enough tabs to fill the header bar
3) Try to move the window around
Boom! You can't! The header bar is full with no place to grab and move the window :\
Apps will literally become indistinguishable from the regular web? This has been the trend ever since the iPhone debuted, and people were furious at the time the iPhone didn't have 'real' apps (incidentally making it, and later the iPad 'real' computers). Mobile is the delivery system, not the content or software. Millennials seem to be incapable of parsing this logic. At some point people will realize they have 'invented' what they had to start with. Consider there may be very good reasons standards for such things became standards, you 'disruptive' valley 'geniuses'. It doesn't matter what's under the hood, most people will never see that, it is not a distinction to anyone but an engineer.
This is a picture perfect illustration of how Gnome has jumped the shark. I booted Gnome off my desktop after the Gnome 3 fiasco. I switched to XFCE. What a breath of fresh air.
Of course, I didn't realize at the time that XFCE is based on GTK, so some of Gnome's shit has been slowly seeping up into my clean, workable, usable XFCE desktop. I've got too much invested in it, but, so far the amount of crap is manageable and can be dealt with by a few tweaks. If worse comes to worse, I suppose, there's always KDE.
In my spare time, for self-education and as a hobby project, I've been hacking my own widget toolkit, and as sure as fuck I'm not going to be doing any bullshit like this. Of course, noone's going to lose any sleep over it, since nobody except me cares about it. But, hopefully, that'll change some day...
I am 100% confident -- based on this kind of crap -- that it's only a matter of time, but Gnome is going to go down, until nobody cares about it, either. Slowly, but surely.
fuck gnome and their useless title bars with their inscrutable fucking hieroglyphics rather than menus with words.
design a UI for illiterate retards and only illiterate retards will use it.
That we put title bars on the back of the window, so that you have to flip them over to see them.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm almost certainly not the only user to configure my window manager to ``windowshade'' applications by double clicking on the title bar. Why screw people by making functions like that application-specific? I foresee this useful window function being:
Why force applications to re-implement useful screen elements that we already have and pretty much guarantee that the function won't work consistently across the applications that even bother to implement it? This sounds like a feature thought up by some one who thinks that an application's ability to have ``skins'' is the end-all-be-all of UI design.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Blows
It takes more thought to come up with a functional design that also works well. Time to go back to the drawing board, the current proposals are at best first attempts.
The problem is how *utterly* retarded and out of touch their mindsets and goals are. ... like a literal mind virus that drives people retarded. (Has anyone seen BrainDead, the TV series? That's how this feels.)
It started with Apple, and Microsoft, Gnome, KDE, (What[TheFuck]WG,) Google, Mozilla, everybody followed them
Frankly, everybody who stopped using plain words in their programs, but uses only abstract icons instead, can fuck off and die.
Even worse if the UI is monochrome. The kind of people who like that, are those who made *literal fucking gray in gray* the year's most popular "color" scheme!
Everybody who says "app" gets a chainsaw to the asshole to the tune of "Bananaphone".
Anyone who dumbed down efficient elegant emergence into "OMGSIMPLE” and "KISS", because he's so moronic that he believes it's either Emacs/VIM or Notepad/iOS as they are mutually exclusives and the only choices and having the best of both without compromises is just beyond him, gets to ride a cactus covered in salt and ants and vinegar, until his head pops off!
Anyone who fucked up "everything is a file", "do one thing, and do it right", or basic modularity, needs to take a long hard MASSIVE WHALE COCK at himself. Anyone who contributed to the situation that "there is an app for everything" because there *has* to be an app for every permutation of features, because you aren't trusted with putting Lego pieces together yourself anymore, deserves to get raped in the ass by zombie Steve jobs, while he slowly feasts or the fart cave he calls his head.
Yah. I'm sorry kids. You and your society went insane. You're literally mentally ill. (Not you, dear reader. You know who I mean.)
And I have had personal eye-to-eye talks with most of the nutjobs that decided that shit, over the years. (Mostly because I wanted to check for myself.) I'm not a therapist, but three people in my family are, and I've been emerged into it since early childhood... but if I were, I'd gladly say this IS medical advice.
... I'm sure the developers will add an option so users can turn this behaviour off.
Log in or piss off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Entirely agree.
That stuff has been around on mac for a while now. iTunes, xCode, Chrome, Firefox. It's a complete pain. Every time you want to move a window, you have to navigate a minefield of buttons and textboxes. And since those geniuses removed the border on buttons, as well, which I see the Gnome guy wants to do too, you absolutely have no idea where to click to safely move. You have to guess. As far away from anything else usually works. Usually. And when it doesn't, you'd better hope you didn't do anything important.
This might be a relevant post from Kwin's main developer.
The classic title bar performs several functions of varying utility. Let me count them.
1. As the title suggests, the title bar displays the title of the window. This typically includes the name of the application and the name of document currently opened, and can easily take half the space available or even more.
2. It lights up when the window is active, and dims down when inactive, helping the user maintain focus with a busy desktop.
3. It provides an intuitive, discoverable way of dragging the window. (For experienced users, Alt+dragging is more usable, although less discoverable.)
4. It is a big target for (un)maximization via double click.
5. It is a big target for opening the window control menu via right button click.
6. It houses the window manager controls.
7. Last but not the least, the title bar is provided by the window manager in a manner consistent across the desktop. If every application toolkit starts doing its own header bars, we lose this consistency.
Since the early days of Compiz, I've set my window manager, so Super+LMB drags a window, Super+RMB resizes it (which works great, because it knows which edge you want to drag by which edge the mouse is closest to), and Super+Wheel closes it.
I highly recommend giving it a try, as it makes window management blazingly fast.
I only have title bars to I know which program it actually is. A little distinct visual pattern is far quicker than staring at a large window for too long since they all use the same widgets. And to contain indicators, like "always on top" "sticky" or a progress indicator.
So yeah, try to take my title bar, and die!
And the four screen corners are for running something (bottom left), task switching (top left) [on top of the usual Super+Tab], file managing, and the info dashboard [which I might also trash, since it's mostly just a gimmick that wastes resources].
But not merely moving the mouse there. (Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?) You need to click too, when you're in the edge. Another click there closes that particular dash again.
I don't put anything on the "desktop" either. It's a stupid metaphor, and the only analogy is that it also mostly just creates a mess.
I haven't had the time to make the move to a tiling WM though. But all my windows are full screen by default, and there's usually one per virtual desktop. Exceptions are things like my instant messenger, where the contacts windows is more like a side bar, and the chat window(s) fill the rest of the screen.
Seems like a joke, but it's not. I sometimes run just twm or fvwm on plain old X.org.
What would this do to that situation? Would the apps still work? Would they revert to older behavior?
Has someone solved the problem of keyboard accessibility of the header bar, in a way that will be consistent across all applications that have it? In a normal application with a normal title bar and menu bar, I know I can press Alt+Space or Alt+underlined letter and access every function. Now, let’s take for example GNOME Calculator. In the top left corner of its header bar, I see a calculator icon that pops up a menu when clicked. How do I access this menu from the keyboard?
No. No.
I read his suggestion, looked up at the top of the window in the Safari browser and see it has:
Close
Minimize
Maximize
Previous
Next
Sidebar
Several plugin icons
The Link Address Field
Reload
Cancel Load
Share
Tab View
In other words, the Macintosh OS already does what he wants.
Sounds like it is time for him to switch...
Gnome re-inviting the wheel, in a stupid way.
I already have my own plans for this space. I want to add buttons beyond the usual for changing desktop oriented parameters.
I am thinking about buttons that let you switch between SCHED_OTHER, SCHED_RR, SCHED_RT and the various priorities.
Another button to either rate-limit IO read/writes, apply a disk usage quota, or adjust ionice parameters between the (Idle,BestEffort,Realtime) classes.
I want next to that, network connection rate limiting, throttling, and even a button to disable this app from using any network resources.
To me the area currently empty in the title bar would be perfect for these things. Hope they leave it alone so I don't have to adjust their patches while working on mine.
So I guess I still will not want to be using GNOME :)
They were like 640x480 or something, and the windows had title bars. Now I consider my 27" monitor to be pretty modest, given what I see others using, and the title bars are literally irrelevant.
Maybe instead we should just have the title bars disappear when you aren't near them, like all the other UI controls! In fact, why don't we have the entire window operate that way, with only the things you hover over being visible? Everything else can fade to light gray on dark white (and in the Linux case, semi-transparent so you can see through to the low-context stuff behind), like the UI equivalent of brutalist architecture.
. . . said pretty much the same thing, but he never expressed those thoughts quite that elegantly.
What is an app?
Taking GUI advice from a Gnome GUI developer is like taking Twitter etiquette advice from Donald Trump.
I don't see even an informal usability study anywhere in that to-do list. I guess actual usability is no longer an objective?
I have had to work on an older Gnome for a while (bundled with Debian jessie). Gnome title bars are humongous. I thought this was utter crap - who would want to use a terminal that wastes so much screen estate for a useless title bar?! But now I see that Gnome designers put some profound thinking into that - make the title bar so annoying that killing it becomes easier. Excellent job Gnome, I suggest you should make title bars larger still to silence the remaining nay-sayers.
For instance, for years now I use Meta+Left Click to grab my windows and move them (KDE).
Assuming that by "Meta" you meant Alt, which is the typical PC keyboard binding for Meta: Your suggestion would block the user from performing an action within an application that is bound to Alt+click or Alt+drag. This might happen in, say, a paint program. Ports from the Mac would be affected, as the Mac has long bound Option+clicking menus to show advanced options. Super+drag could work, as the Super key already has an icon representing windows on it.
But the other thing a title bar is useful for is to raise or focus a window without the click activating any control within the window.
Headie bars will never replace tittie bars...
have you ever tried to reposition a firefox or chrome window that is full of tabs?
That's not actually too much of a problem. Still plenty of space to grab at the top. What is a problem is doing common actions. Take a look at his examples and tell me if you can figure out how to maximise or minimise that Chromium window.
What are the drawbacks of connecting a keyboard to a tablet and doing programming on that? AIDE runs on an Android tablet. Even the limits of iOS aren't quite as limiting now that Swift Playgrounds exists.
But Rollup/Shade. This is SO useful. I'd hate to see it go.
I despise this whole turn the PC into a cell phone.
My scroller no longer lets me to middle click.
It seems like the system is continually in scroll mode.
It never stabilizes enough to allow middle button mode to work.
I blame this on Tablet modes too.
Take away my middle button, and I've got a Middle Finger for You.
The title bar has a functional purpose: it's easy to click and grab to move a window around without mistakenly clicking on other UI elements which might modify your document. Sure, on some platforms (X on *nix) you can use a meta key (usually alt) to click anywhere on a window to drag it around but good luck getting Windows (or Mac) users to memorize that.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This guy has got to be one of those people who runs everything maximized. Even on Linux where I have a way to drag windows without title bars, I would still find this a step backwards.
In XFCE, the window controls are "pin to desktop" (the window stays in position when you change desktop), "window menu" (allows always on top/always on bottom, in addition to other window choices), maximize/unmaximize, minimize, roll up (shrinks the window to the title bar) and close. That's how a standard looking X anything looks in XFCE.
But of course, some of what I use are GNOME applications. These forcefully discard all this useful stuff. They replace the close button with a big gray "X" and everything else with stupid glyphs they copied out of whatever the worst version of windows they have is. Because Microsoft is doing it, they have a dark gray on light gray scheme, instead of a user-configurable one. And naturally, they don't have the pin options and other controls that I want.
I'm sure that as this disease spreads, it will not be done cleverly. If it hits LibreOffice, I'm sure it will detect that the computer DOES support the GNOME awfulness, and use that (yes yes, it could be done correctly and seamlessly and display the GNOME crap for the GNOME users, but seriously, do you think they will go that path?).
The funny part is that this is actually a debate between:
1- One giant gray double or triple height bar with uncustomizable icons and a limited set of useful menu controls.
2- Two normal height bars taking up less space on the screen, one obeying system standards that the user can configure if he so desires and containing window options, and the other obeying the logic of the application designer with all the options logically arranged.
The only reason there is wasted space in the first place is because of whatever bland-flavor-of-the-month UI choices GNOME is busy aping.
Desktops are fine. Either you have a small screen and fullscreen apps with no title bar. Or a big monitor and space taken by title bars is a rounding error. These concerns seem to linger from days of 1024x768 15 inch monitors where real estate was at a premium.
Why not take all this energy to change things and put it into modernizing actual apps? Word processing has not changed from the days where people would write stuff and print it out as books and fliers. Make a "word processor" for web and mobile consumption with interactive feachers. Make a music jukebox and a video player for organizing content from multiple streaming services.
Instead people have itching fingers to keep rearranging basic UI, making things look fresh but preventing anyone from becoming really proficient.
I'm guessing you didn't use BeOS a whole lot. The tab title bars were fantastic. Part of what made them good was that you could position the tabs to allow for 'layer' of common windows. The fact that it was (as I recall - been a long time now) a manual process to slide the tabs into position was a bit of a pain, but being able to have things stacked was great. It really added a nice 3rd dimension to the work area - especially on the monitors that were available at the time.
Gnome is based on the "Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away" idea (by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry). It has been progressively reduced and I believe that leads to interesting results.
Also, moderation is recommended, as in the phrase attributed to Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
Just today I tried to get rid of the "Minimize" and "Maximize" decorations in Xfce (after a review of another DE). Turns out I never minimize windows and I thought maximizing by double-clicking on the titlebar or dragging it to the top of the display. As it happens, I occasionally use the middle and right buttons for special maximizations (try them on the maximize button).
The concept of not having a titlebar is not new (the seldom seen UDE does without them since long) -- and I seem to remember removing it in some other desktop (long ago). That idea was much needed with normal displays, because the number of lines is too reduced -- for instance on a 768p notebook.
As we head to HDPI screens, this will no longer be a concern (though in small smartphones screenspace will always be scarce).
(When I'm doing GIS or scientific visualization I need a _lot_ of pixels!)
What does "full screen" even mean in that context?
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Your aunt? How can you dare define someone by his/her/its sex? You sexist (or genderist)
You're banned from my conference on palsy.
You mean something with ordered choices,? Great idea...we could call it a "menu" and make it look like the sensible and useful drop-down lists of choices that all UIs had until the crack-ass designers started fucking everything up with "discoverable" interfaces.
Welcome to Reinventing The Wheel part 78, where designers finally pull their heads out of their asses and go back to doing what worked for decades! Whoo hoo!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I've finally gotten around to using i3 as my main WM. A tiling WM. Best thing to happen to me in ages. We need to ditch the desktop metaphor already IMHO. It's not 1992 anymore.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Spastic? My aunt has cerebral palsy. Please check your ableism."
That appeal to authority through familial disadvantage does nothing to refute the argument that without disability, one ought to be able to manage the windows as they are.
semantics are everything!
Firefox already tried this on Windows and it looks horrible.
Those of you who use Firefox on Windows, how many of you don't switch off browser.tabs.drawinTitlebar immediately on every fresh install?
With statements like this, does this clown really wonder why no one takes GNOME seriously anymore?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The 'people skills' line is funnier.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Cuck harder.
Of the three today so far, this was the easiest to determine the answer.
Yes, even easier than the woo-woo "Do particles have consciousness?".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My title bar says, "Should Apps Replace Title Bars with Header Bars?" My answer is, NO!
No and No again.
A header bar? WTF is a header bar?
Also, ALSO... What about DESIGNING in "ADVANCED" functionality?
My point being, they've been slowly dumbing things down or slimming and sleeking things up for a while now. Getting rid of the menu bar, etc.. etc..
I seem to remember programs that often had a simple option for "advanced" mode. Why not just keep dumbing your shit down the way you want and slapping fancy buzz words together, while ALSO offering an easy to access NOT HIDDEN way to revert to an 'advanced mode'. 'this advanced mode option' will revert your app (application), back into a program with LOTS OF OPTIONS and usability features that allow the USER to CUSTOMIZE and STREAMLINE his/her fucking WORKFLOW or whatever fucking words you want to use.
It would be real simple to do. That way there are two options. Regular mode and advanced mode. Advanced mode will confuse and scare people who don't know what a program is and don't want to know, while at the same time offer a way to NOT fuck over a loyal user base and perhaps even maybe, entice people who are interested in customizing their desktop and it's programs/applications in ways that suit them as an INDIVIDUAL.
Also to note. The spirit of free software itself is our ability to 'change' things, 'customize' things, and 'LEARN'. How about we keep that option open and develop into it, rather than try to buzz word it out of existence in favor of rigid trendy bullshit?
TL;DR
GNOME is Free Software. So be programmers and offer the users options to keep their title bars OR use the new 'header bars', whatever that is. Mate works great for me. It's the gnome that was beautiful, feature rich, and kicked windows' UI to the curb, in my mind, when migrating. It had it's bugs and blips back then; but those seemed to have ironed themselves out...
It's the same reason people bitch when a logo gets redesignedâ"most people hate change. It takes them out of their comfort zone.
I've used Linux minimally. My brief exposure to the previous Gnome3 desktop did leave me wondering: why the fuck are these titlebars so goddamned big? It was like the UI designers went âoeHmm, Windows has title bars. Let's do that.â and promptly left the design to rot. Granted, Windows and macOS still use titlebars, but they do a better job of visually merging them with the window chrome. It's a much more pleasing visual experience.
Gnome doesn't need to redesign the function of title bars so much as it needs to redesign the impression that they give. Let them serve their purpose, but visually let them take a back seat.
Who else stopped reading two words into the summary?
Seriously, guy, FOAD. My life is already bad enough trying to move Chrome and (as of FF57) Firefox windows that are full of tabs.
Maybe if the trends of BRAIN-DEAD TABLET-STYLE DESIGN and CARTOONISHLY LARGE FONTS and ABSOLUTE SHIT INFORMATION DENSITY went away we could spare a vertical centimeter for useful UI bits. For people who like to move windows around, Fitt's Law is a good thing.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
this would only work on people who are dumb enough to not realize the difference between rhetorical speech and ridiculing disability.
I like the idea in theory, I don't like the implementation. I want my window manipulation decorations drawn by the window manager so that they're uniform, not the application which can decide to be haphazard about it. I agree that the space is semi-wasted, but that isn't fixed by removing the decorations from the WM (besides, I can just have my window manager draw them anyway, and then I'd have two).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I turn on window manager decorations in Chrome. I refuse to use it without.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
What are you, some kind of nìgger?
I look forward to your 60th birthday. Your opinion may have changed by then.
Blah blah blah gnome sucks. Like a broken record all the haters come out in force. How about you just stfu and use another DE if you don't like it? I for one would welcome this change. The problems with browsers can be mitigated by a small blank square that you can drag the window with, etc.
wrt the hidden/non-exitent/2-pixel wide resize and scroll controls, I'm 100% with you.
> what happens when the window manager uses BeOS style titlebars?
I give up, what? In the WM or for the user?
It seemed unusual at the time, but a great idea to have the title bar only as wide as the app's name - you have a single target to click and drag the whole window, without it blocking out everything else from extending the empty block all the way to the right.
And, courage. So. Much. Courage.
There are no titlebars in my tiling WM.
Cramming the titlebar full of fuckwittery makes window movement difficult for most users (most don't know about [alt]+ modifiers in *nix or tools like AltDrag for windows).
Cramming the titlebar full of twatmimicry requires that the titlebar be made huge to accommodate UI elements that should have been in the app -- meaning the content area is diminished (aka: those elements could have just been in the app) and apps which don't have asshattery in the titlebar get a fat bit of obtrusive system chrome to annoy the user.
Requiring that the app toolkit actually take over the rendering of the titlebar, as these GNOME knuckleheads want, flies in the face of paradigms such as separation of responsibility (that's what the fucking window manager is for, dimwits -- the app shouldn't be dealing with moving itself about or maximising, minimising, zooming, zooting, shading or pooting) -- but even more fucking heinous is that people who set their desktops up to look a way that they like (say, with ultra-pink bordering, whatever floats your parade float), get an extra giant "fuck you" by some remote designer with ambitions to get their name in a book somewhere.
I say leave the titlebars alone. It's enough that browsers want to collapse titlebars, making overlay apps like WinAmp and audacious, which used to be perfectly useful, more of a mission (and thank goodness I can override that browser dimwittery and force a titlebar in KDE, so Audacious still has a home!), but now GNOME wants that to be every fucking app? No. No, no, no.
Of course, it will happen though: GNOME developers stopped listening to their users long, long ago.
Designs need white space. Period. In the realm of user interface design, that means you should not cram every available pixel with information.
This is design 101.
We need title bars precisely because they don't have anything on them.
I hate gnome for this. I really hate it. I run XFCE because gnome's become a mess lately anyway. But every once in a while now something will open an evince window or I want to play Iagno. It's bad enough that those windows don't follow the system theme at all (which was once a solved problem). But they misbehave in all sorts of ways. First, they are missing certain buttons like the one to pin a window to the current desktop.
I set up the mouse wheel and left-double click to shade the window. Gnome apps ignore this which is incredibly annoying. Even worse, left-double click causes them to maximize. I almost never maximize windows. I shade them all the time. It almost feels hostile.
Equally annoying, I often use windows when they are not completely exposed. (Another window partially covers it.) I disable raise on click and use follow focus for this. (I raise windows by clicking title bars or boarders.) Gnome apps are impossible to use in this kind of work flow. They still raise on click. (Steam does the too. Actually steam does all of these this too.)
To make all of this worse, I know that gnome can support these sort of things. I've configured it on a work machine that only has gnome3. But I can't find a way to make Gnome apps behave when run under XFCE. I've changed the settings using dconf-editor, but the Gnome apps just ignore it. This is hostile. Gnome apps are beginning to scratch the surface of how user hostile and unfriend the desktop is going to become once client side decoration become the norm on Linux. (And unless some one sets them straight, Wayland is going to make it the norm.)
It's just another bad attempt to seem creative or modern by ignoring both the lessons of the past and the users who are impacted. Maybe in 5 to 10 years some creative genius will bless us with by implementing a revolutionary subsystem that provides and enforces basic, common UI elements that can be set to the user's liking without developers having to re-implement in several libraries?
Funny enough, I just noted a post-it app I have up is using client side decorationsbut still manages to handle shading correct. Still raises on click and can't be pinned. But there's hope these wheel will eventually be rediscovered or reinvented.
I don't want to comment prematurely on the merits of this idea. It might be better suited for small devices (smartphones).
However wouldn't this be better coming from a non-Gnome guy? Even KDE, they both had pretty WTF moments (and by moments, I mean years).
In fact a lot of innovation in the UI world has received a whole lot of negative commentary from users. We need some credibility and wisdom to move the bar forward. Playing up the Gnome angle is like a daycare hiring a B&E guy. It's not pedo level bad, but it's bad enough.
Alt-F7 and Alt-F7 for what? Maybe I'm stupid right now, but I don't understand how to drag something with shortcuts. Do you mean to move them with the keyboard? (That I'd support.)
I didn't mention it, but I do actually also have keyboard shortcuts for anything too.
Super-End = close, Super-PgDn is minimize, Super-PgUp is maximize, Super-Home is the screen lock, etc.
And Super- with the numeric keypad keys, results in placing the windows quickly. E.g. Super-Num9 puts the window in the upper right quarter. And Super-Shift-Num9 in to the upper 9th (which is a hack that I made).
I can switch between windows by using Super with Arrow keys too, which works as you might expect.
The reason it is like this though, is that I'm left-handed, so no WASD or Tab shortcuts for me. (I could remap the keys in a mirrored fashion though, now that I think about it.)