Replace the black bar by a GtkStackSwitcher

[Kekun]

The black bar looks quite odd, especially with the regular GTK+ theme. It also doesn't look very GNOME 3 like.

What about using a GtkStackSwitcher in the center of the header bar instead? It would avoid having an odd looking widget and would automatically adapt itself to the user's theme, would be more compliant to the GNOME 3 HIG and would save vertical space.

If for any reason a stack switcher isn't usable, its behavior is easy to mimic, but given that the black bar switches a GtkStack already it should work well.

[baedert]

stackswitchers don't do icons and are way too wide for the header bar. I also still want to see a title. And wow it's boring.

[Kekun]

The title is pretty useless as for the vast majority of the cases it just explains what the already selected icon shows. If you are OK with it I don't mind implementing this change.

[baedert]

I'm ok with it, I like the current style.

[Vistaus]

@Kekun I'd love this change! Could you implement it so that we can get a taste of how it looks and feels in practice?

[Kekun]

@Vistaus Sure I'll definitely try, I have a buggy prototype so far.

[Kekun]

FYI, here is a screenshot of what it looks like so far: https://pasteboard.co/GNndwd8.png

The badges are forced just for dev purpose, I plan to change their color to the "highlighted" (blue in Adwaita) one later so don't worry that they are there and all grey. The creenshot shows the smallest width possible with the bar centered (instead of filling all the available space) and with 12px margins added before and after each icon. The margins could be made smaller if needed to get a bit more vertical space.

For the moment the width of the horizontal bar is fixed to the smllest possible, but it could be asked to take all the available width if needed. Here are example taking all the available space or not:

• https://pasteboard.co/GNnfLUf.png
• https://pasteboard.co/GNng39X.png

Any feedback is welcome.

[Vistaus]

It looks great so far! I really like this implementation! 😄 Two things though:

1 Not sure why there are selection boxes on the buttons? 2 Not the most important thing and of course it's a matter of opinion, but I think it would be better to have text on the buttons when the window is maximized (so text beside icons). That'd look better than stretched out buttons.

[Kekun]

1 - There are the notification badges, the blue dots that normally notify you of new content. They have been forced to be displayed for development purpose, and they look like checkboxes because I need to fix their style. 2 - I agree the buttons look really bad, though I doubt having icons tunring into text randomly would be good, and having both text and icons is a bad practice. I found a new solution: I set the margin to 6 so we can shrink the window even more (84 saves pixels) and the widget's natural size is tweaked so that the widget can expand as the window expand, but up to a limit we can set. Here is a video of the result: https://youtu.be/aXgly_-SOCg

[Vistaus]

How are things progressing, @Kekun ? :)

[Kekun]

I didn't touch it in the previous week. What is still to do:

• draw the badges with the theme link color rather than a hardcoded one,
• show the navigation box only when it makes sense, and display the headerbar's title otherwise.

I'll go back to it as soon as possible but I'm currently super busy with more urgent projects. :x

[IBBoard]

Sorry, but IMO those buttons are just far too cluttered in the header, and you lose some of the clean and conventional information about where you are (without extra cognitive effort)

[Vistaus]

@Kekun Are you still working on this?

[Kekun]

@Vistaus No I stopped as @baedert seem to prefer the current style and I didn't have much free time to work on it. :/

I may work on that again depending on how the current UI work on the Librem 5.

[Vistaus]

@Kekun Alright, I understand. Thanks for trying though! :) But in that case, you might as well close this issue for now.

[Kekun]

Sure. It can always be reopened later if needed.