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I use a "very portable" 12.1" widescreen laptop. With only 800 pixels screen height I'm always on the lookout for ways to shrink things up vertically. One thing that stands out to me is the title bar. Both the title bar and the menu bar often have significant amounts of unused horizontal space. I.e. the set of menu titles rarely fills the width of the window and the application title and window decorations are also typically well spaced.

This leads to the suggestion: can the contents of the window title bar and the main menu bar be packed into a single "top bar". This bar would, for example, have the window icon (window menu) on the left, followed immediately (left to right) by the application menu then on the far right the traditional minimise, maxmise and close decorations. The title text is omited but appears anyway in the task-bar, task switcher etc. The new combined top bar occupies the same space as the existing menu bar but keeps all the basic window manager funcions available.

I'm aware there are other solutions such as putting the title bar on the side of the window rather than the top, or removing window borders and title altogerther but I personally find that less intuitive or unfairly restrictive (I don't need to run everything full-screen).

like this...

something similiar to chrome on windows...

trying my hand at mock-ups. Here is a picture to make the concept as I had it in my mind completely clear. Not clear about how best to host images so I'm experimenting... hope this works.
... moved to above ...

Great! You should add this picture to your first post too, so its faster to see.

Although I find it rather weird, it is a good idea for small and wide-screen displays. I'm not sure how hard is it to implement, as KWin is responsible for the title bar but not for the menu.

After posting this I happenned to notice that iTunes is laid out like this...

I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement. Due to the modularity of app and window manager I can imagine it needing some careful thinking. But its hard to imagine IMHO that it hasn't been at least considered previously.

Well, I think Apple were the first to do that kind of stuff in act.

Can this be implemented directly in the Oxygen theme as an option ? It would be very cute indeed.

So this idea was a duplicate in the end...

I can't help but think that this would combine well with the idea of "hideable" menus. In this case a hide button could be added to the combined title/menu bar. However the main reason for hiding would now be to reduce visual clutter.

FWIW...

This idea is duplicated to many others. Why this one have many possitive votes? Maybe for chrome browser?

Lachu wrote:This idea is duplicated to many others. Why this one have many possitive votes? Maybe for chrome browser?

Maybe because he's using Konqueror and browsing forum.kde.org in the screenshot?

When I look at the problems with a simple Mac-Style-Menu...how should this feature be implemented?

How do you wanna move the window if its smaller than the main menu bar?

I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not, so I've gone and coded something to help decide. It's far easier to see with a working prototype.

http://www.sharpley.org.uk/page/blog/21

It's a standalone executable with a combined window title and menu bar using a method that I think is the most sensible for doing this. It's more for the point of trying to fix the UI bugs (such as where do we show the window title?!)

If I get some kind of feedback, I might make a modded kdelibs to affect all applications to be like this.

Report back.

As long as it is optional, it's a good idea for small displays. But i rely too much on the text in the window title bar so wouldn't want to use it. The window title bar sometimes is the only place where you can read a website's title in full length. Especially on bugs.kde.org I would be lost without the title bar and there are a lot of other sites, where I always visually recheck the title bar.

What's with shading the window?

I think I'd prefer tabbed windows to this idea, and since, you know... we can't exactly have tabs AND the menu in the title-bar...