My idea is largely inspired by luebking in his forum post: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=285&t=123426&p=322809&hilit=dwd#p322809. It's presented mainly as an alternative to CSD or DWD, for space efficiency only.

Personally, my biggest problem with the current KDE design is that they waste a lot of precious vertical space. With the 16:9 monitors being the norm, the current programs feel like they're still designed for a 4:3. I don't mean that the programs are old, just that they're designed in a way that vertical and horizontal space are equally important. For example, dolphin:



In my layman opinion, the vertical arrangement "title bar" -> "menu bar" -> "tool bar" provides a consistent look but takes too much vertical space and leaves a lot of unpopulated horizontal space (as painted in red): It "feels" unbalanced.

My idea would be to "embed" both the menubar and toolbar into the title bar (hence the name). It would create an icon for the menubar and add the toolbar icons into a designated area inside the window decorations. If needed, the window title can be removed to make room for the icons. It would still be a server side decoration but with the added space efficiency considerations with little change to existent code. I made a terrible and crude mockup for the system settings.



I'm pretty sure you guys can come up with way better looking concept arts than me

Now the questions:
1. Would this be possible to implement using kdecoration?
2. I see some use cases where this embedded decorations might not work so well. How would we graciously fall back to the original arrangement?

I hope I didn't make any bad criticisms. I really like KDE and Plasma and hope to use them for as long as possible I have some experience with C++ programming, so if this is actually possible in KDE and there is interest/help I could invest some time and come up with a proof of concept for usability tests