Friday, April 15, 2011

Gnome 3 Massive Title Bar

Seems they were planning on doing something with the title bar so made it frigging HUGE!   This might be ok on a 22" monitor but netbooks this will be an issue.   Most of the space is controlled in the main theme XML file.  So to make much much smaller run:


  • Open a terminal window
  • sudo sed -i "/title_vertical_pad/s/value=\"[0-9]\{1,2\}\"/value=\"0\"/g" /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml
  • Close terminal window
  • Hit ALT-F2
  • type restart 
  • hit enter
This will change the title_vertical_pad from 14 (on normal font size) to 0.  Then restart the gnome-shell without you having to log-in/out or lose what your working on.

There's talk about creating a netbook theme but until they do the above will do the trick.

23 comments:

  1. Thanks, this is one of the biggest problems with gnome 3 and you have solved it for me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you so much for sharing this !!! :)
    I personally use XFCE + Compiz + KDE4 Window Decorator (since Compiz 0.9.5 does not support Emerald themes anymore) but your tip helped me on slimming down the title bar on clients laptop. Already saved it on my google docs !

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is just what I needed. Many thanx!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. it didnt work for me :( plz help. could it be because im on 12.04

    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks for solving this. for me.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks Michael,

    Works on Ubuntu 13.04 + GNOME Shell 3.8.2.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Many thanks! Works also on Fedora 20 with GNOME Shell 3.10.2.1

    ReplyDelete
  9. Excelent! Worked on Ubuntu 13.10 with GNOME Shell 3.10.2.1

    ReplyDelete
  10. Works well enough, thanks. However makes close button X look like dot (at least on Fedora 20). Any idea how to fix?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Best I found was to edit "/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml" and change all the values of "title_vertical_pad" to "2", except the one that has the comment saying it has to be one smaller (make that "1"), and then set the value of "D_icons_shrink" to "3", and "D_icons_grow" to "3".
      This doesn't save quite as much space as the method in the original post, but it does leave you with buttons that still look right.

      Delete
    2. sudo sed -i "/title_vertical_pad/s/value=\"[0-9]\{1,2\}\"/value=\"5\"/g" /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml

      Delete
    3. I had the same problem ("X" looks like a dot) in Arch Linux. I think it looks good with title_vertical_pad=0 as long as D_icons_grow=3.

      Delete
  11. Thanks for publishing this! I allways go to this page whenever I do a clean install. It does turn the close button into a dot, but since they threw out the minimize/maximum buttons it's something I can live with... rather then those ridiculously large borders!

    ReplyDelete
  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Isn't it much easier to type 'gsettings' command into terminal?!
    $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences titlebar-font 'OpenSymbol Bold 8'

    ReplyDelete
  14. Another thank you! Many of us clearly agree with the sentiment expressed in the title of your post. But we must also be grateful for the Gnome team's great work creating an interface we can all fine tune to our own preferences. Personally I chose padding with 6 pixels ( sudo sed -i "/title_vertical_pad/s/value=\"[0-9]\{1,2\}\"/value=\"6\"/g" /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml ) and then used gnome-tweak-tool to set the Windows Titles font (DejaVu Sans Book 9) and to select a Windows theme which provided appropriately scaled icons (I chose Esco, there are many). I am running on Ubuntu 14.10 / Gnome 3.14.1

    ReplyDelete
  15. Thanks a lot. It worked on Debian 8

    ReplyDelete
  16. Now all of the font keeps blurring like it's going in and out of focus. How do I get rid of this theme? It has messed everything up.

    ReplyDelete