GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 334795
put space between close and maximize button
Last modified: 2009-01-19 19:56:23 UTC
Currently clearlooks and various other themes have the three buttons for minimize, maximize, and close all closely together. I would like to suggest instead you would have: minimize, maximize, a space and then close. (the space would be roughly the same size of the other buttons.) The purpose of this is to help prevent users accidentally clicking close when they intended to click maximize. The macintosh approached this differently by having the close icon on the other side of the window but I dont think such a drastic change is really needed but just a minor tweak to the current layout would be enough. This can happen to all users but particularly users with motor control difficulties (a twitch, RSI, any kind of injury) or users with difficult interface devices like trackpads, or a dirty mouse.
This cannot be controlled by gtk-engines, but may be possible in the metacity theme. Moving to gnome-themes.
After further research... Metacity itself (not the theme) defines the size and position of the buttons. You can control the order of the buttons in a gconf key. However, I don't think you can control the spacing or size.
Actually, metacity have not a gconf key to control the spacing.
You can generally set the size with the theme and font size. Spacers can be put in these days, too: see GNOME bug 509165. Is that any help?
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!