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Comment by thesuitonym | Hacker News Reader

Titlebar buttons are actually bad. The titlebar exists (or existed) for a reason, so you'd have somewhere you could grab to manipulate the window. Now it's kind of a guessing game with every app on where you can grab without causing the app to do something you didn't want.

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If that's a problem for you, you have much to gain with better window management shortcuts. On KDE I have the Windows key + left click set to drag a window from anywhere, and win + right click to resize depending on the quadrant the cursor is on. It's incredibly satisfying not having to hunt titlebar empty spaces or thin edges.

My main interaction tool with the system is the pointer. Reaching out for the keyboard is something I do when I want to type, but for example when I am consuming content on my computer I just keep a single hand on the mouse or the trackpad. In that case shortcuts are just plain annoying.

On KDE, something nice is that if you have a maximized window and a panel on the top of the screen, I can drag that panel to grab the window (or maybe it was a setting of Latte dock or something). And since window titlebars nowadays can be cluttered with buttons, it is a predictable way to grab those windows only using the mouse.

There's a lot of mouse centric workflows, where you don't want to keep switching between mouse and keyboard all the time.

The reason they have to put all that crap in the title bar is because of all the other bad UI decisions that used up all the screen space.

But do you see that title bar buttons are bad explicitly because you have to hunt for title bar edges?

That you were more or less forced to adopt these KDE shortcuts so that you could work around the fact that they had cannibalized the title bar for a purpose it was not designed for.

You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years

> You were forced to change your workflow and everybody else is having to be forced to adapt because they changed a metaphor that has remained stable on the desktop for over 40 years

All of the "positive" items I listed come with drawbacks. I didn't realize I might be in the minority for this one, since I genuinely prefer the new workflow.

The old ways supported both keyboard and mouse workflows, on purpose. There was no reason to collapse the titlebar except for the unfortunate time when 16:9 monitors were forced on us and vertical space became precious. A time thankfully that is over.

Today I have one 3:2 and one portrait monitor so compacted titlebars are particularly poor design.

Thankfully KDE for the most part does not indulge in that, and let’s you fix window borders, but they have other failures such as hard coded button order in dialogs.

I wasn't forced to adopt tho, these shortcuts go back to when Windows had chunky borders in XP/7. It was just something that a lot of Linux WMs did and it's incredibly useful so I found ways to do the equivalent on all operating systems.

Also KDE seems pretty staunchly _against_ client-side decorations with buttons other than the window manager buttons.

The arguments in this thread-- amounting to "it's a good general practice because I happen to like it" (rather than "it is a sane / discoverable / usable default") are precisely demonstrating why these issues exist.

UX design is treated as a subjective matter, as if it is equally valid to clearly label UI elements as it is to have magic, nondescript UI pixels that serve as vital control surfaces.

Go watch videos of the research Xerox did on UI/UX and HCI in general, and weep for what we have lost...

I already weep deeply for what we have lost, and what we cannot imagine, and what we can imagine and build but nobody would use because they are too ignorant to learn and adapt.

My argument for the titlebar is that it was at least researched UI/UX convention done by Apple/IBM/Microsoft at the nascence of personal computing. These are the primitives that arose from that research.

It is not out of what I happen to like that I argue this. I personally am deeply frustrated by cursor-y window controls. I much prefer a tiled interface with a top menu bar and copious keyboard shortcut compositions. I, if I could, would Never use the mouse, and if I needed axial control for a 3d environment would prefer to use an analog stick of some sort. Unfortunately those are not the conventions we have for general computing, especially in the workplace.

We are in general forced to use the conventions given to us by the major OS providers. One of those used to be the titlebar, with which you could use the cursor to control the window. The insistence of the current tech industry to shove any button they like up there without regard for these conventions that have been set for decades (and were in many cases of this sin set by their company: M∫/M$ --the integral symbol is a slop 'S') is causing real economic harm in terms of lost productivity from broken muscle memory and wasted actions

fwiw, when I'm on an OpenBSD desktop, I use cwm which doesn't supply titlebars, and I use Meta+click to move windows. That's great...On OpenBSD. But sometimes I'm using a Windows computer. Sometimes I'm using a Mac.

...And sometimes I'm using OpenBSD, so titlebar buttons introduce a titlebar I didn't want, and didn't need, which doesn't match the rest of my desktop customizations.

It's just a bad paradigm.

If they do it correctly there's plenty of free space in the titlebar for grabbing. That's how it works in GTK+3 and later for example.

But it causes cognitive overhead: you need to think about which bits of the title-cum-button bar are safe to grab, as opposed to which overloaded and do other things, which are possibly useful.

I use Firefox. I also use macOS a lot. Firefox assumes your tabs are horizontal. Mine are not (using a built in feature).

So it doesn't use the title bar much. So there's an option to turn it off. It's off by default. Result, the actual top bar is a cluttered toolbar and it's hard to move the Firefox window.

If there'a a visible title label, that's obviously safe for grabbing. Firefox is probably doing it wrong by not leaving some visible space for users to grab at things.

> Firefox is probably doing it wrong

Up to a point -- although Mozilla added vertical tabs about a year ago, it's pretty clear nobody uses them, same as nobody left at Microsoft is competent enough at customising a Windows desktop to know how to use vertical taskbars, so they removed that option from Win11.

But saying that, although I do not like GNOME, I review the new version every 6 months, so I do try it. I find the same problem with GNOME CSD apps.

It is not confined to the problem of moving windows. The GNOME developers are clearly obsessed with gestures -- even the welcome tour contains instructions on trackpad gestures, and my machines have the trackpads disabled. I use mice, because I prefer them.

With a mouse on Linux, the middle-button has 4 main functions:

1. Open web links in a new background tab.

2. Middle-click the title bar to push the window behind other windows.

3. Middle-click in text to insert the currently-selected text at the cursor.

4. Close browser tab.

I do these things hundreds of times a day. Literally, no hyperbole.

GNOME has removed functions #2 and #3.

From this it seems apparent to me that the GNOME developers do not really know how to use mice effectively, and mainly use laptops with trackpads.

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