GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 782770
old style menu in header bar ?
Last modified: 2017-06-28 22:07:37 UTC
Created attachment 352063 [details] illustration of desired unification of title & old style menubar See illustration Would it be possible for Gtk to automatically place the MenuBar inside the HeaderBar if no "SubTitle" is specified by the application, saving screen space? (such that the MenuBar occupies the space the SubTitle would have taken) When running legacy applications (e.g. emacs, anything else), there is the undesirable effect of having screen space taken for a large 'HeaderBar' holding the WindowTitle+MinimizeIcon+MaximizeIcon+CloseIcon , AND space for an additional old-style MenuBar. Alternatively, could these old-style applications automatically revert to using an old style thin title bar , (e.g. if no icons or subtitles are added to the HeaderBar), achieving the same amount of space used in classic environments.
Created attachment 352072 [details] screenshot of header bar alongside a titlebar+menubar screenshot of header bar alongside a titlebar+menubar, showing how much screenspace a title+menu takes up compared to a title+subtitle. the former is a huge area, despite still being 2 lines of text. It would be nice if a title+menubar could take up the same screenspace as a title+subtitle.
no. we are not going to do any automatic things. It is up to applications to populate their ui, including the header bar.
Ok since posting this , I found you can actually shrink the titlebar with some gtk config file , which does what I want (before that, experimenting with themes, it looked like those bigger title/header bars were permanent). https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/257163/reduce-title-bar-height-in-gnome-3-gtk-3 maybe you could change the defaults so that 'classic' applications look more classic out of the box.. in the default configuration it looks like they clash. maybe you're just hoping eventually all the applications will adopt the new style.
I don't have high hopes for application consistency in general. That being said, titlebar height is a topic that you need to take up with the theme designers. They are constantly looking for ways to shrink it.