I don't understand this report. In fullscreen mode, no window elements (whatever
that is) should be visible. Please try to rephrase your report.

The window elements are Menubar, Rulers, Scrollbars, Statusbar. They are turned
off by default, but can be shown using either the rightr click menu or in the
preferences.

What do you mean they are inactive? You really need to try to explain this better.
You should also add some more information, such as what window manager you are
using and what Linux distro.

I understand what he means.

When you add scrollbars, for example, to the display in fullscreen mode,
clicking at the very edge of the screen doesn't pick up the scrollbar - there is
a 1 pixel edge after the scrollbars. This is very bad usability for fullscreen
mode, where your edges are the most valuable screen real estate after the
corners and the current placement of the mouse pointer.

This is probably a GTK+ bug, but I guess that you know better than me, Sven.

Some investigation shows that:

 - quickmask toggle, navigation and auto-zoom (the 3 corner elements of the
scrollbar) go right to the corner (good)
 - rulers go right to the sides as far as dragging in guides is concerned (good)
 - scrollbars don't - 1 pixel border below and to the right (bad)
 - Menu bar doesn't go all the way to the edge - 1 pixel border around all of
the menu entries (bad)

That is pretty much all of the functions that I would have a use for in
fullscreen mode - the cancel button looked to go all the way to the corner in
the status bar, but I didn't get it clicked in time for the plug-ins I tried.

The corner buttons only work if Menu and Statusbar are turned off.

How would that be a GTK+ bug? There's a 1-pixel wide border in the image window
simply because it would look crappy if it wasn't there.

This is certainly not a major problem, I would even go as far saying that it is
not a bug at all. Lowering severity of this bug report to trivial.

Ah, cool - so the 1 pixel border is a GIMP addition. I thought we were just
drawing everything inside the top-level image window straight to the root
window, thus I thought that GTK+ might have been adding the padding inside the
window.

If the only reason for the 1 pixel borders is that without them it looks crappy,
I'd like to suggest that we remove them, at least for a couple of 2.3 releases,
to see if it is really annoying. If it isn't, I suggest we keep the borderless
widgets - this really does improve usability in fullscreen mode.

There's a few articles explaining why - perhaps someone else has the URLs handy.

Adding usability keyword while I'm at it.

Fitt's law. That's what it is. I'd forgotten. 

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5724/g1/glance.html
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html
http://joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html

We do add a 2px border as soon as either menu- or scrollbar are visible.

GtkScrollbar itself however has a border of its own (easy to see from
just looking at the widget). The same border exists in GtkMenuBar.
I don't see what we could do to fix that.

Is there any way to communicate with GtkMenuBar and GtkScrollbar to let them
know that we're in full-screen mode and don't want them to draw a border?

If not, I could open a new bug for this over there.

Just to jump in here and comment.  It's pretty important that items holding
position on the edge of the screen can be activated from the edge.  The
gnome-panel was designed to sit against the edge of the screen and allow you to
throw the mouse to an edge and activate the button or applet that is there. 
Fullscreen mode in applications should behave this same way.

No, the borders can't be configured away. The only salvation is to
implement widgets of our own (won't happen!) or complain against GTK+.

Can we do away with the borders that are under the control of the GIMP, and
either create a different bug or reassign this one for the menu and scrollbar?

Regarding comment #12: Fullscreen mode in GIMP was designed to be used for
viewing the image w/o any disturbing widgets. Perhaps the best thing we can do
is to make sure that it is used this way and simply remove the possibility to
add scrollbars, menus and other widgets in full-screen mode.

At least the scrollbars are very useful in fullscreen mode.

I don't really care about the status bar.

The menu bar is useful for people who don't know that F11 is teh shortcut key to
fullscreen mode, and don't use the pop-up menu.

Is it really that hard to remove the padding from the buttons? The GTK+ issue
will have to be reported anyway, since it affects Epiphany, OpenOffice.org,
Abiword and gnumeric (at least) as well. 

At least the menubar has been taken care of now:

2005-05-18  Sven Neumann  <sven@gimp.org>

        * app/display/gimpdisplayshell-callbacks.c
        * app/display/gimpdisplayshell.c: hack around with gtk+ widget
        styles to get rid of the menubar padding in fullscreen mode.

Removing the 2px border fixes the remaining issues and it does IMO look quite OK
if a 1px spacing is added in the main vbox. I've done these changes in HEAD now.
Closing as FIXED.

2005-05-18  Sven Neumann  <sven@gimp.org>

	* app/display/gimpdisplayshell-appearance.c
	* app/display/gimpdisplayshell.c: removed the 2px border and
	replaced it with a 1px spacing in the main vbox. Makes the screen
	edges active when working in fullscreen mode (bug #165774).

Note that the scrollbars still not touch the edge of the screen but this needs
to be taken care of in GTK+. There's IMO nothing we can do about that. Did
anyone file a bug report against GTK+ yet?