Hacker News Reader

Comment by maybewhenthesun | Hacker News Reader

I like the top panel in gnome. You need a place for your clock and you status icons. I don't really care much if it's at the top or bottom or sides.

As an aside: From a 'clickability' perspective the app menus in the top bar are nice of course and I theoretically agree that's the best place for an app menu. But in practice I really dislike macos' 'separated' app menus when a window is not maximized.

View on HN

On MacOS it was a great example of the use of Fitts law, a vertically infinite target for your mouse pointer for commonly used tasks when you didn't memorize the keyboard command. But on a giant monitor it's too far away from your work. Macs, for the longest time, had 512x342, 640x480 or 512x384. It was already getting far away at 1152x882.

Many apps these days have tabs at top like chrome or firefox and having a top panel (with or without menu bar) means you loose the useful of the fitts law for accessing the tabs of such apps.

That's ok because in a lot of cases they also have a little border at the top that's not clickable. Nobody is thinking of Fitts law anymore.

I can click that top border part and chrome still select the tab (tested on Windows and KDE)

It works on chrome but not all programs with the same look.

Even better, Command-? opens a search menu (usually under the "Help" button) that points you at the first matching menu option (even if there's no shortcut for it). The Unity DE tried to replicate that with their HUD feature, but it wasn't universal. It's an incredible feature and I wish everyone copied it.

The panel itself is not the problem, it's the lack of integration with windows. In GNOME, when you maximize a window, the title bar stacks underneath the top bar. If that window also happens to have a menubar (e.g. LibreOffice) that gets stack underneath as well.

This is just a lot of wasted space and makes the menubar harder to click, compared to having the menubar at the very top, next to the screen boundary.

I would like this feature to save screen space, but what happens when a window isn't maximised? The menu bar items get orphaned? Or you have differing behaviour?

IIRC Ubuntu provided this when they introduced Unity -- quite a long time ago. When the window is maximized the menubar was merged into the top panel, but when the window was not maximized it looked like a regular window with tilebar and menubar at the window's top.

Not long ago there was also a KDE extension to replicate this; however, since many GNOME apps moved away from menubars, this approach isn't that helpful anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com