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Comment by VyseofArcadia | Hacker News Reader

I loathe applications that put controls all over the title bar.

The title bar is supposed to be a mostly empty expanse that you can grab with a mouse. Now it's littered with controls, and I can hardly bring windows to focus or move them around without accidentally searching something or confirming something.

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Agreed - especially if I'm remoted into a box and not necessarily running a full-resolution screen. Bad UI design is magnified when you're at 1024x768.

I find it somewhat ironic given current GNOME that when I was choosing between GNOME 2 or KDE 3 back in the day, GNOME 2 won as bits wouldn't float off my screen...

It annoys me particularly when I want to move a Firefox window. I have to find that one tiny spot that still allows me to move the thing.

I was under the impression this was controllable.

+100 couldn't agree more. And it's not a rational decision, it's a UI trend.

I used to agree, then I moved to Linux (KDE specifically) and found out I could set my DE up so Super+LMB anywhere on a window moves it, and Super+RMB resizes it, it's is way more convenient, I haven't found myself using the title bar any more.

But using the title bar is what most of us are used to.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Discoverability rears its head. I don't see how moving that functionality into some obscure button combination is better than obvious behavior.

I'm not advocating for this to become the default functionality across the world for everyone, it's definitely very opt-in.

In that case you don't need discoverability for something you set up yourself.

It's also very fun to play with when using the Wobbly Windows effect, you can stretch them in different ways depending on where exactly you picked the window up from.

I have Alt-LMB for moving, but that all falls to pot when I remote into another machine -- alt-lmb moves my rdp/vnc/browser, not the one in the screen I'm connected to.

Title bars also serve to more quickly recognize where windows are. If every application fills up the title bar with different stuff, it becomes harder to “parse” where windows are on the screen. There is an inherent benefit in windows having uniform “chrome”.

At least on gnome you can drag or resize a window from anywhere by holding Super.

And you can, of course, reassign that key.

Resizing takes grabbing an edge though.

Alt+drag by default, but I remap it to super in dconf.

With GTK you can at least drag the window by grabbing controls in the titlebar.

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