== What windows I use window titlebars on
Yesterday, [[I said ../tech/WindowTitlebars]] that I consider window
titlebars as user interface elements and think it's sensible to ask if
they're useful for any particular interface. As you might have guessed
from [[what I've written ../programming/OnInterfaceStandardsII]], I
don't consider consistency between programs to justify bad interfaces
in things that I use a lot, and so I'm perfectly willing to eliminate
titlebars on some of my windows if they're not justified.
So, are they justified for me?
In my environment, there are a continuum of answers. In some cases
([[such as _xrun_ ../sysadmin/ToolsXrun]]) I consider the titlebar an
essential part of the interface; if I didn't have a titlebar, I'd have
to display the same information in the main program area somehow. At
the other extreme are things like my digital clock display, where
a titlebar would be utterly pointless (and indeed normal people's
environments make such things into 'applets', which don't have titlebars
either). In the middle ground are cases like web browsers. A lot of
the time a web browser's titlebar (showing the _
_ of the page)
is essentially pointless; it either shows stuff I don't care about
or duplicates information on the page itself. But some of the time a
browser's titlebar information is actually pretty useful, and in general
I've found that leaving it out feels a little too minimal; a web page by
itself can be awfully blank-faced, and having a titlebar somehow makes
it a bit better.
(Honestly compels me to also admit that having titlebars is my window
manager's default behavior, and sometimes I use a program more than a
bit but not quite enough to go to the effort of turning its titlebars
off.)
The situation with my terminal windows is complicated, but they don't
have conventional titlebars. Ultimately the reason is not that their
titlebars wouldn't have useful information, but that they take up too
much space because I use so many terminal windows and I overlap them so
much. The result is that I want as much space for real text as possible;
space for titlebars is space that I can't be using for real text, so out
they go. I work around the loss of information in part by putting the
hostname (and an indication of whether or not I'm root) into my shell
prompt.
=== Sidebar: how I deal with missing window controls
Of course showing the window's title is only part of the purpose
of titlebars (arguably the lesser purpose these days). They also
contain various standard controls for things like closing the window or
maximizing it, and they give you something to grap onto to move it. With
no titlebar, I don't have those controls either.
My solution is twofold. First, I attach the window operations that I do
a lot to 'chorded' mouse buttons; for example, Alt plus the middle mouse
button will move a window. Second, I have a popup menu in my window
manager that gives me do all of the things that the titlebar controls
do; this is arguably slower than the controls themselves, but is not too
annoying for infrequently used options.
I say it's only arguably slower because of [[Fitts's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law]]. Titlebar controls are
usually fairly small and must be hit with relative accuracy. My popup
menus require very little precision at all to summon and generally have
larger targets once they've popped up. Thus I would not be surprised if
actual measurements showed that experienced users could perform window
management faster through popup menus than through the controls.
(Of course this is where everyone notes that keyboard controls are
even faster.)