On Jan 01, 2009 I wrote My window theme, on the subject of Sundry Hacks, Howtos, and Linux.

Thomas Thurman, champion that he is, took my request for a theme for Metacity that clones the XFCE Prelude theme and went ahead and did it. What a hero. Anyway, I've tweaked his work a little to make it closer to the XFCE theme (primarily making the border thinner and nudging some of the colours, and hiding the buttons on inactive windows) and you can grab the theme file. Save it as $HOME/.themes/Prelude/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml, then say System > Preferences > Appearance > Customise > Window Border and choose Prelude.

Some questions that might spring to mind:

How do you move windows around when there's no title bar?: Hold down Alt and drag them
How do you know the title of a window when there's no title bar?: It turns out I very rarely actually need that. If I really desperately need it then I just throw the mouse at the bottom-left corner which shows me all the windows (it's a clone of Exposê on the Mac) and that shows the titles of every window.
How do you close a window when the close button is so small? Don't you know anything about Fitts' law?: Alt+F4 or Ctrl-Q, normally.
Isn't having to use keyboard shortcuts annoying and slow and wrong and bad and anti-Tognazzini's advice?: Yep. I wouldn't give Prelude to a new user, absolutely not. I'm not a typical user.
Why do this at all?: Because I think it looks pretty. If you don't then don't use it.

Chris

You're mental!

ethana2

I use window-picker-applet to display the current window title and window controls, and I just remove everything from window title bars; I just call them 'grab bars'. They're maybe 8 px thick.

Move: drag grab bar

Maximize: double click grab bar

(Un)Minimize: click icon in window picker applet

Close: click close button in window picker applet

..Then I use the DarkRoom theme.

nemolivier

Great ! Just like you I don’t need any title or big window theme. At this time, i use the « nothing » theme !

Jef Spaleta

Can you make sure this gets uploaded to some place other than the blog so I can find this again later when I'm looking for themes. gnome-look.org would be the obvious choice.

-jef

sil

Jef: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=96232 as requested.

onoj

This is really nice - pretty much what I've been looking for, thanks!

Sebi

Wow, this theme is awesome. Thank you so much. What a great way to start the new year!

Rodney

Excellent! I really like having access to all my screen realestate instead of giving up significant portions to unusable UI cruff... Thanks!

David

Away with administrative debris! You could go even further and consolidate all your menu bars into the Global Menu panel applet. Incidentally, that applet provides yet another way to access the window controls.

sil

David: I looked at doing that earlier today, but I think that I may try doing away with the Gnome panel next -- I use Enso for most access anyway. The problem I have is that I'm not sure what to do with the useful stuff that appears in the notification area -- Pidgin's icon, that sort of thing. Also...what happens to apps that add a notification area icon if I don't have a notification area? Bet some of them crash :-)

David

Stuart: Well, you could have a small unexpanded panel in the corner just for the notification area. Unfortunately, such panels fail to take advantage of Fitts’ Law (bug 125226).

What are you using for the Exposé effect with Metacity?

sil

David: I'm actually using compiz, not Metacity, but compiz uses Metacity themes happily.

sil

(and I'm using the Compiz shade plugin)

Mathias Hasselmann

Heh, and I considered myself nuts when creating this humoristic theme years ago: http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/plainx/

bkor

I use Super instead of alt. I have the following mappings:

Super-Z = close; Super-X = Maximize. Almost never use the mouse for those.. except for maximizing (by double clicking title bar).

David

Oh. That makes more sense. Thanks.

asker

How to resize window?

jorge

asker: to resize the window alt + middle click. Great theme by the way!

asker

Is that true, I can not resize window with alt + middle click (but alt+F8). I can not resize the windows using mouse or Touchpad

This is a wonderful theme, and getting better if it provides a intuitive way to resize window (like using mouse).

Tom W. Most

stalonetray is an extremely lightweight standalone system tray replacement. As for programs crashing without a tray, I haven't known any to do so yet (I use the awesome 2.3 window manager, which doesn't provide a tray), though some are less usable without one. Pidgin, in particular, is a pain to deal with without the tray icon. It's also kinda important for nm-applet and padevchooser.

sil

Have been poking around -- it doesn't really buy me a lot to use stalonetray rather than gnome-panel with just a notification area in it, does it?

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wolfer7

Nice theme! I modified it some more: to match my dark window theme (dust), I changed the color to black. Additionally, I removed the left, right and lower borders. In my opinion it looks awesome and saves me a lot of screen real estate. Thank you!

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