GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 555489
Allow fullscreening of any application
Last modified: 2020-11-07 12:35:54 UTC
It would be great if any application could be run in fullscreen mode, as a feature of Metacity rather than the program itself. There are lots of legacy and not-so-legacy apps that don't implement a fullscreen feature, and could benefit from having the window manager handle the fullscreening for them. (A VNC viewer program that doesn't have a fullscreen mode made me think of this, I was viewing a remote desktop of the same resolution as my own screen, and had to keep scrolling a little bit in each direction to see the edges of the screen.) There could be a sensitive region at the top of the screen that shows the hidden titlebar, and lets you get access to the Metacity menu so that fullscreen can be disabled again.
I think this is already possible with keybindings, isn't it? I'd say it should not be in the graphical UI because we should be clear about whether the app or the WM provides the graphical part of this, and I think the app should do it so the unfullscreen etc. controls can be nicely worked in to the app. And also the app should do it because right now for most apps where fullscreen makes sense, the app already does it, and we'd create weirdness if we added an extra set of WM controls. The app can also be smart about when to show/hide controls e.g. showing video controls when a movie ends, or whatever
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old feature requests in Bugzilla which have not seen updates for many years. If you still use metacity and if you are still requesting this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/metacity/-/issues/ Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry it could not be implemented.