Get rid of the Caption/Title bar
Blender renders all its interface. It even has this nice blender icon on the top left. A lot of new software even by Microsoft removed the caption bar which doesn't seem to play any role in Blender. At least on Windows get rid of it it just takes up precious space for no good reason.
And maybe put the _ X icons on the right and that's it. I am pretty sure nobody will miss the caption bar.
It's really just a relict design from long gone times.
UPDATE: I was informed that there was previous such request here: blender.community/c/rightclickselect/pddbbc/
This idea was marked as a duplicate of Window decoration border.
15 Comments
I can't agree that it's just "relict". It serves at least a few purposes:
If it's bothering, you can Toggle FullScreen as @zickkie said... Or if you just don't like that it's dazzling white - change it to another color :)
* @ErminOS * Windows UWP applications don't even have a title bar as a default option. Even Microsoft decided they don't need one nearly 10 years ago. So it is a relict. I do agree with your points. But they can be implemented in a different way. And there are a bunch of newly redesigned softwares that show what can be done - ranging from Chrome to Firefox to Visual Studio 2019, etc. My point is that Blender is already UI heavy application and it could use those wasted pixels in a better way than to adhere to UI design from the early 90ties.
My suggestion is also not about aesthetics but about usability. It is a whole row good for buttons.
* @ErminOS * In the lower right corner Blender display the version. A piece of information that doesn't really help anything. A perfectly good place to achieve nearly all of your points.
* @Zingam * Just because some folks at MS don't remember and don't honor good UI history and traditions established by the same company over decades, we should not forget or abandon that easily.
* @ErminOS * Like 15 years ago I asked on blender forums, why don't Blender improve on the layer system, somebody answered me that Blender had a perfect layer system and didn't need to do anything about it. It seems that Blender developers have meanwhile forgotten about their great UI legacy and recently they came up with completely revamped layer/collection system, way more sophisticated than I could have imagined. Bill Gates also supposedly said that nobody will ever need 670kb of memory :)
I used every single Windows since at least 2.0, incl. MacOS, Motif, GNOME, etc. Windows 10 UI is by far the best and least frustrating to use on average.
Isn't that what you need?
* @zickkie * Not really. Fullscreen is something very different. Here is what I'm suggesting:
Chrome, Firefox, Visual Studio, Paint, Visual Studio Code.
{attachment Screenshot_2021-03-02_080330png}
* @zickkie * Even Windows Terminal:
{attachment Screenshot_2021-03-02_080654png}
Photoshop:
{attachment Screenshot_2021-03-02_081602png}
There are a plenty more examples.
Ive made a proposal about this some time ago : blender.community/c/rightclickselect/pddbbc/
* @Shimoon * Cool! I couldn't find it (I actually made a search before posting this). Upvoted. (Maybe update/extend the title a bit?)
BTW. Right now Blender displays version number in the lower right corner. It is not a very useful piece of information. This place could be reused to display save status/file name, if people need to have that information.
* @Zingam * For me exact version info is very important. Also in video streams / tutorials it's often the only way to know - with which version the video was made. So, even if it could be customizable, I would vote for it to be enabled (visible) by default :)
* @ErminOS * May I ask why do you need to see the exact version all the time? You can check it in About Blender. Isn't it also displayed on start each time? You could even make yourself a plugin to display it in the middle of the screen all the time. :) It is actually customizable. I just found about it. Right-click on the status-bar. For some reason it disappeared while I was switching between modes and when I switched to fullscreen and back it reappeared. So there is a bug or a feature there.
BTW. The discussion about the version is a bit pointless apparently but thank you anyway.
* @Zingam * I think, I already answered - why (because Blender versions and features change so often, that it's very helpful to see the version number info in screenshots/videos)
I was thinking the same, but actually starting Blender in Full-screen (command-line switch “-W”) and having the taskbar auto-hide and using a legacy software called Taskbar Activate would work just fine to recover that extra display valuable vertical real-estate… a trick to make the taskbar stay hidden completely is to use Process Hacker to hide the blue line in the Windows sub-menu (I know it is a bit confusing, but I can make a tutorial if many are interested). Then it will stay invisible all the time while making the auto-hide feature work almost as it should, and even if a software is in full-screen, it will not steal the “always on top” of the taskbar, which is the most annoying thing about the full-screen experience.
Please keep in mind that Blender also supports macOS and Ubuntu and it's current design doesn't fit into the design language of any of these OSs. And this is just a workaround. One can say smartly - buy a bigger monitor and stick a tape on the top of it to hide the title bar :)))))))