GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 319723
Should have option to hide Close button
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:36:58 UTC
Not sure if this is an EWMH issue or a metacity issue, but it crops up on the usability list from time to time and I can't see a bug about it, so here's one :) Basically, the HIG would like to specify that certain types of window shouldn't have a Close button in the titlebar-- specifically, alerts and dialogs that offer the user both confirmation and cancelling actions. The titlebar Close button is entirely ambiguous in those situations, and its usage could result in unintentional loss of the user's work.
Would be an EWMH and GTK issue first but it involves metacity. I think metacity has a way to do this already, though it's a legacy way; you can set the MWM hints. So if GTK used those for now and then we can find a more standard approach later, that would make sense.
_NET_WM_ACTION_CLOSE already exists, so the EWMH half of the issue is already solved. ;-) I just ran a grep -r "_NET_WM_ACTION_CLOSE" * in the gtk+ source directory and didn't find anything, so it appears that gtk+ still needs to support it.
Um, don't know what I was thinking when I wrote comment 2; _NET_WM_ACTION_* are atoms used by the WM to communicate to clients (via _NET_WM_ALLOWED_ACTIONS) what features exist. In particular, the EWMH even says the WM should ignore the value of _NET_WM_ALLOWED_ACTIONS when it initially manages a window since the value may be left over from a previous window manager with different policies.
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