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.
You’re mental!
Posted by Chris on January 1st, 2009.
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.
Posted by ethana2 on January 1st, 2009.
Great ! Just like you I don’t need any title or big window theme. At this time, i use the « nothing » theme !
Posted by nemolivier on January 1st, 2009.
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
Posted by Jef Spaleta on January 1st, 2009.
Jef: http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=96232 as requested.
Posted by sil on January 1st, 2009.
This is really nice – pretty much what I’ve been looking for, thanks!
Posted by onoj on January 1st, 2009.
Wow, this theme is awesome. Thank you so much. What a great way to start the new year!
Posted by Sebi on January 1st, 2009.
Excellent! I really like having access to all my screen realestate instead of giving up significant portions to unusable UI cruff… Thanks!
Posted by Rodney on January 1st, 2009.
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.
Posted by David on January 1st, 2009.
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 :-)
Posted by sil on January 1st, 2009.
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?
Posted by David on January 2nd, 2009.
David: I’m actually using compiz, not Metacity, but compiz uses Metacity themes happily.
Posted by sil on January 2nd, 2009.
(and I’m using the Compiz shade plugin)
Posted by sil on January 2nd, 2009.
Heh, and I considered myself nuts when creating this humoristic theme years ago: http://themes.freshmeat.net/projects/plainx/
Posted by Mathias Hasselmann on January 2nd, 2009.
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).
Posted by bkor on January 2nd, 2009.
Oh. That makes more sense. Thanks.
Posted by David on January 2nd, 2009.
How to resize window?
Posted by asker on January 3rd, 2009.
asker: to resize the window alt + middle click. Great theme by the way!
Posted by jorge on January 3rd, 2009.
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).
Posted by asker on January 3rd, 2009.
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.
Posted by Tom W. Most on January 3rd, 2009.
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?
Posted by sil on January 3rd, 2009.
[...] neuen, größeren Monitor entschlossen habe, wollte ich die Nutzung der wenigen Pixel optimieren. Dieses Window Theme hat mich überzeugt, dass Titelleisten eigentlich nur unnötig Platz [...]
Posted by Wer braucht Titelleisten? « Kornels Welt on January 4th, 2009.
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!
Posted by wolfer7 on January 6th, 2009.
[...] the DarkRoom Gtk theme and my own Prelude-dark Metacity theme (a darkened brown version of the Prelude Metacity theme that Thomas Thurman made for me), with the gorgeous Smokikon icon set, all [...]
Posted by as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge on January 9th, 2009.