Remove the Title Bar from Gnome 3 on Maximize
Gnome 3 has a wonderful UI, but one glaring fault. The top system bar serves as a “title bar” for your current application, telling you what app you have open, and allowing you to exit the application from the bar itself. Unfortunately, the default theme, Adwaita, has huge looking titlebars, which don’t really get in the way when you are working in normal sized windows. When the windows are maximized though, you have 2 titlebars taking up precious screen realestate: the big Adwaita titlebar, and the system bar up top.
Two Title Bars eating up my screen, providing useless duplicate information.
Fortunately its real easy to fix this.
Open your Adwaita xml (/usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml) file and change the line that configures the maximized window (name=”max”). Add has_title=”false” to the “frame_geometry” tag. Then look for “title_vertical_pad”, and change “value=9″ to value=”1″. Restart Gnome 3 and maximize a window. *poof* the UI makes sense now.
No more evil redundancy eating up my screen
Interestingly, you can still drag down from a menu or button bar to return to a normal sized window and get your duplicate titlebar back.
UPDATE 6/19: I hadn’t tried it, but thankfully, someone else did: This still works in Fedora 17. 
http://www.mind-download.com/2012/05/hiding-title-bar-on-firefox-under-linux.html
This not only didn't work, but it screwed up the title bar and make it look like windows 3.1.
Maybe you could post a picture of the actual config screen or post terminal commands for this? Luckily, I backed up the file before trying this
Same problem here. After examination, I realised that it is because I copypasted the ' has_title=”false” ' from the article. Note that the autoformating converted the quotation marks into curled quotation marks, which is not xml apparently.
So either you retype it, either the writer of the article replaces the curly quotes with straight ones. Blink blink.
Interestingly, while I managed to get rid of the 3.0 nostagia, I still get a few pixels of title bar when maximized. Still a great improvement, but feels a bit… unfinished.
That was so obvious, and hidden so well in plain sight. Thanks for finding it. I'll update the quotes just in case someone else copys it.
Also, I think those few pixels are the only place you can grab from. I'd check myself, but I'm a little GNOME-less right now. In any case, playing with the file should allow you to remove all the pixels.
Misspelling, or putting stuff in the wrong place can break it like that. I think the theme it defaults to when everything breaks is "mist," which I honestly almost kept that way.
I'll post my config file in it's entirety later today for you.
Thanks, this worked for me and looks good. Drag window down to unmaximize. ryan, you probably had a spelling error or didn't put the 'has_title="false"' in the header of the max window tag.
Thanks for that stewart. I kinda erased my mbr a week ago, and haven't had the time to repair it. so… haven't had the file to post. But its good to know that my instructions were accurate.
Thank you very much.
This is a great improvement for me.
hj,
i disable windown title on max but…when press window keyboard for show windowS, windows not arrange, has window big, has window small…
Great!
Work perfectly to me. But I wondered if it's will be possible in other Windows Themes. Already tried, but it's kind different.
Yea, I think its a separate theme engine too. Can't recall. You might have something similar available; it doesn't hurt to poke around.
Amazing!!!
Thank you so much, I've been looking for this. Work perfectly with Status Title Bar extension. Perfect!!!!!!!!!!
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/59/status-…
I’m glad it is working well for you!
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i’d rather get rid of the the top system bar than the title bar of my application, a lot of the time the application title displays some useful info, like the file you are working on …
Took a little work, but got it working with Carbon. Fantastic, thank you.
Works great! The first time i tried, the window effectively became a mess, but as a matter of fact was misspelling error.
Instead of
has_title=”false”
I put
has-title=”false”
Not very obvious…
Thank you for posting this!
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Works on Fedora 18 beta, too. I have
metacity-2.34.13-1.fc18.x86_64
gnome-themes-standard-3.6.2-1.fc18.x86_64
Thanks for the tip. I actually like Adwaita otherwise, but the superfluous and big title bar always annoyed me.
If you do the same for non maximised ( name=”normal” ), you can not move the windows around.
In order to keep the ability to move them but still you reduce the size of the title bar. Simply change “title_vertical_pad” to one but leave has_title=”false” off. Or set has_title=”true”
Thanks!