Greg Grossmeier: GNOME Shell + Ambiance tweaks for screen maximization

I’m a fan of how GNOME Shell is working out (mostly). At least enough for me to use it full time.

I also am afflicted with the same vertical pixel issue on my x220 many of us are complaining about. To combat this I already do certain things like use Tree Style Tabs in FireFox nightly and get rid of the gnome-terminal menubar when maximized (even though there is an annoying bug where Unity and GNOME Shell don’t play nice together).

One thing I just added, thanks to the pointers from Jonathan Palacek is to remove the redundant info in the title bar and top bar of GS. To do this you simply need to install a couple extensions and edit a text file.

The two extensions are:

• Extend Left Box
• Status Title Bar

To get rid of the window title bar when maximized is a bit difficult right now. I followed this guide to do it for Adwaita (GNOME Shell’s default theme) but since I use Ambiance I had to make some modifications.

Here’s the diff (since the whole file is pretty long):

greg@x220:/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1$ diff metacity-theme-1.xml ~/tmp/metacity-theme-1.xml.ambiance
39c39
< <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false" has_title="false">
---
> <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false">
43,47c43,47
<   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_width" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_height" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="0"/>
---
>   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="button_width" value="18"/>
>   <distance name="button_height" value="20"/>
>   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="12"/>
49c49
<   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="1"/>
---
>   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="1" bottom="1"/>

I may have done a couple extraneous edits in that file as I did this while on a plane and couldn’t look up documentation (or even that guide I used before); it was all from memory. If you see something wrong, please share!

Maybe this will help you out maximizing the scare vertical pixels on your new laptop.