Wednesday 12 August 2009

Adjust Titlebar Transparency in Metacity

I might be in the minority with this sentiment but I really dislike the transparency Gnome has gained on its inactive window titles when using the GTK window decorator. So here is how to make inactive windows have a solid title-bar or if you are are fan of it, make it even more transparent.

Press alt+F2 and in the run dialog enter:

gconf-editor

Navigate in the left hand tree to the branch /apps/gwd/

The two values we are interested in are :

metacity_theme_opacity which affects inactive window titlebars
metacity_theme_active_opacity which affects active windows

A setting of 1 will make the title-bars solid while 0.75 is the default at three quarters opacity.

7 comments:

Jeff Badge said...

Thanks! That was driving me nuts, and I'd been all over the CompizConfig settings trying to figure it out.

SubBASS said...

I'm glad it was helpful. I had also looked everywhere in CCSM looking for the setting initially.

devolute said...

Thanks dude, the opacity on my new 9.10 install was bugging me

Anonymous said...

Thank you, dude!

Unknown said...

Unfortunately this doesn't work.
Btw, regarding comments, what does Metacity has to do with Compiz settings?
They are 2 different Window & Compositing managers. Anyway, title bar transparency is not done in Compiz settings but Window decorator, most probably Emerald (depends on which of them you use).

SubBASS said...

Luboss: This does still work if you are using Metacity as your window decorator. If you do not have any compositor running then you will not see any difference, but then you would not have been looking for a solution to the rather ugly default (my opinion) ;)

The comments refer to Compiz because that is where myself and at the very least Jeff had looked, Metacity did not used to have compositing so it wasn't the first place to look for an option/fix, Compiz however does do things like that and would seem a logical place to initially look, incorrectly as we now know, as stated.

I thought the post was quite clear about it being Metacity, but perhaps it was ambiguous in some way. It does not relate to Emerald at all, it has nothing to do with Compiz other than initially thinking it was a newly introduced Compiz setting that caused the effect.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info...