Wednesday 14 April 2010

Howto: Move the Window buttons back to the correct side.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx has moved the window buttons to the left on the title bar. Its a peculiar thing to decide to do and myself and others I have spoken with can't see *why* they should chose to do it. The only answer I keep coming back to is that this is just something to stand out and give a unique(ish) appearance, as part of their re-branding.

Well, I would much prefer them back over on the right, as I feel it looks better and I really don't see the point in moving something that
requires a retraining has no purpose than for appearances sake. In my opinion of course.

Paste the following into a terminal:

gconftool-2 --set '/apps/metacity/general/button_layout' --type string ":minimize,maximize,close"

Or, fire up gconf-editor from a terminal or Alt+F2 run dialog, and in the left pane navigate to :
apps / metacity / general

In the right pane double click on button_layout and paste in:
menu:minimize,maximize,close

Note, if you select Ambiance again in the theme selector it will again "break" your buttons, bit of a nuisance.

This will give the original layout, be aware that the default themes will look a little broken if you do this, if you do use the orginal theme I would advise you to keep the order of maximise,minimise,close (I am not sure whether it still breaks the buttons surround). They will look fine in the new order on the right, the bevelling on the theme will look nasty if you re-order the buttons though. Personally I don't much like the default theme so I will be retaining my current window decoration and going back to the "old" order.

The window theme I use can be found here : LINK :


2 comments:

King Goddard said...

I think it was a good idea. If you think about it all of the menu items are already on the left side mostly. I think out of habit though it is odd. It takes a little while to get accustom to, but once you do it is fine.

SubBASS said...

I have to say I disagree, lets say you are using Nautilus with the new button layout. You go up to the file menu and misclick, Oops, you now just closed the window instead, re-open Nautilus and navigate back to where you were, thats not going to get at all infuriating.

Ubuntu is also the distro windows users are moving to, I don't have statistic on hand, but its a fairly safe assertion. Moving the buttons to another side, you just added one more reason/annoyance to get in the way of a smooth transition.