LinGui: GtkHeaderBar UI

[samhutchins]

Most modern Gnome applications use a header bar which integrates the toolbar into the window's titlebar. HandBrake still uses the classic menubar, and I was curious about what a more modern approach might be like.

I thought I'd open a draft PR to see if this is something y'all are interested in, and to get some feedback

Before:

After:

I've been careful to maintain all the functionality that's found in the existing menu bar, by adding menu buttons to some of the toolbar buttons

I appreciate that "more modern" doesn't necessarily mean "better" ;-)

[galad87]

That's definitely ugly imho 😆

[samhutchins]

Ugly in a fundamental way, or ugly in a "it needs some styling" way?

[galad87]

Not a fan of the unified toolbars, and the big NeXTSTEP style buttons don't help. Anyway, this it just my opinions, I don't have a say on the GTK UI 😜

[samhutchins]

They don't have to be quite as big

[robxnano]

My two cents: I'm not really a fan of this design either. It looks cluttered compared to most Gnome applications, which typically have only a few buttons on the headerbar and don't use as many labels. If you moved some of the less-used buttons to the overflow menu and shortened/removed some of the labels, it would look better, but at that point it might end up being less user-friendly than the previous layout.

But also I think you have to take into consideration the users of other desktop environments like Plasma or XFCE, for which this design would arguably be a downgrade. If we do decide to go through with this I think it would be a good idea to allow choosing between the traditional menu bar layout and the header bar one, similar to the approach taken by Evolution.

[samhutchins]

That makes sense, I think I agree. I don't expect I'll take this much further to be honest, feel free to close :-)

[jstebbins]

My $0.02. I really wish gnome had not gone in this direction. In some instances it's so cluttered it is unclear where you can grab the title bar in order to move the window. Nautilus file manager is an example of this. I keep hoping that it goes the same way as the experiment with putting the application menu in the screen hot-corner. Another bad idea since you often could not move the mouse to it without traversing another window and causing it to switch to another application.

If gnome persists with this design pattern, we may want to throw some token controls up there just to "fit in". But I don't think the primary workflow controls belong there.