Much has been discussed recently over the location of windows buttons [ Maximize, Minimize, Close. etc ] in the upcoming release of Ubuntu Lucid [10.04].
Two school of thoughts in argument over if Ubuntu should look more like “Windows” or should it emulate the “Mac” when it comes to the window buttons placement…
At SGLNX, we shall quell this rhetorical debate….. by letting the users decide what to put on the top-left or the top-right for every window in Ubuntu. The solution is actually simple and a no-brainer.
Hidden in the Applications menu button, there is an item that is installed but not shown. This application is known as the “gconf-editor” or “Gnome Configuration Editor“. This gconf-editor will allow the user to configure many aspects of the Gnome look and setup, including Power Management and window buttons layout.
To enable the gconf-editor in the application menu to be shown and clickable, simply right-click on the Ubuntu icon on the top-left of the screen, select “Edit Menus”. Click on “System Tools” and check the box that says “Configuration Editor”. Once that is done, click the “Close” button.
Now, the gconf-editor should be visible in the applications menu. Left click the Ubuntu button on the top-left corner of the screen. Move the pointer over “System Tools” and click on “Configuration Editor” aka the “gconf-editor”.
To change the layout of the window buttons, expand the “apps” branch and scroll down to search for the term “metacity”. This “metacity” is the windows composition manager. Expand the “metacity” branch and click on the “general” branch. On the right sub-window, there should be an option “button_layout”. Double-click on this “button layout” and change the value to “close,spacer,maximize,spacer,minimize:menu”.
This will change the position of the buttons to the following layout. [aka Mac style with a spacer in between each menu button to prevent accidentally clicking on neighbouring buttons]
To modify it to suit your taste, a description within gconf-editor is shown for guiding those whom want to change the button locations.
Arrangement of buttons on the titlebar. The value should be a string, such as “menu:minimize,maximize,spacer,close”; the colon separates the left corner of the window from the right corner, and the button names are comma-separated. Duplicate buttons are not allowed. Unknown button names are silently ignored so that buttons can be added in future metacity versions without breaking older versions. A special spacer tag can be used to insert some space between two adjacent buttons.
If the old Windows look is preferred, simply change the values to “menu:minimize,maximize,close”.
Ed: What’s there to argue over? Just make your own changes to your hearts desire!
Tags: button, buttons, canonical, layout, left, mac, right, style, top, ubuntu, window, windows