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pop-os / cosmic-epoch

Next generation Cosmic desktop environment
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[Feature Request] Global Menu and Window Button applets #894

Open vibudh007 opened 1 month ago

vibudh007 commented 1 month ago

I'm being quite selfish with this feature request but essentially I would like to replicate the workflow I had with KDE a couple of years ago before updates to KDE made it impossible to achieve and I switched to GNOME which doesn't have some of these features.

Here is a screenshot of what I'm talking about Screenshot_20221026_173130

In the top panel, there are a few important extensions. Namely, the Global Menu and the Window Buttons. The Media Player is also useful but not as important.

With the Global Menu and the Window Buttons, I could delegate the tasks of the top bar of every window to the top panel of the desktop, and remove the top bar of each window altogether. This would give me more space on the screen for the windows. I could also conveniently pull my mouse to the top right of the screen and left click to close the active window without having to look for the close button of that window.

In the screenshot, the top bar is compact and doesn't stretch to the whole screen but I would usually keep it stretched to the whole screen.

I miss how clean and efficient this felt. I've tried cosmic and it's 90% of the way there to be able to replicate this workflow, but is missing those couple of applets at the moment.

If the cosmic devs see any potential in either any of the applet ideas or the idea of being able to turn off the top bar of windows, then I would love to see them implemented.

Drakulix commented 1 month ago

We get a request for a global menu a lot. The big problem here is, that there isn't a unified protocol for this to work reliably across apps. Displaying the title and window controls on the other hand would be trivial.

vibudh007 commented 1 month ago

@Drakulix Will there be a way to disable window top bars as well?

Drakulix commented 1 month ago

If we would add such an applet, it should be accompanied by removing window headers, however I don't think we have concrete plans for that yet.

For that at least a protocol exists, however some apps might not respect that or decide to only hide window controls from their top bar.

Hate9 commented 1 month ago

It's worth stating for the record that while a global menu is (sadly) not yet implemented for Cosmic, you absolutely can put your "window buttons" in the Panel. If you go to Settings>Desktop>Panel>Applets, you should be able to add "App Tray", which is the same "window button" applet otherwise found in the dock at the bottom. I, too, hate having more than one panel/dock taking up screen space.

vibudh007 commented 1 month ago

@Hate9 By "Window Buttons", I did not mean the app tray, I meant the minimize, maximize and close buttons. Having one set of them in the panel instead of one set for each open window makes it so that there's some screen space saved (At least in Qt applications) and also you can quickly flick your mouse to the top right of the screen to close the currently focused window.