Tuesday 4 August 2009

Howto make autohide panels smaller and hidden more in Gnome

Autohide panels in Gnome default to a 6 pixel strip remaining showing. I suspect this is done to "reduce confusion" which is a popular phrase from the Gnome guys, regardless its a little annoying to autohide a panel and still have it show around 20% of itself, so lets fix that.

The easiest way to do this is pop open a terminal and enter:

gconf-editor

This is quite a daunting program if you are fairly new to dabbling in the guts of OS's, and I must warn you to be a little careful in here, certainly don't go just changing stuff around to "see what happens"... Ok, no-one is that dumb... right?

Anyway, down the left hand side is a nice tree menu, navigate to:

/apps/panel/toplevels/

You should then see your panels on the left in the toplevels branch, possibly named bottom_panel_screen0, top_panel_screen0 or simply panel_0, panel_1 etc. Click on each of the panel entries and you will see the right pane populate with some "keys", locate the one auto_hide_size which is very likely set to 6 at the moment, change the 6 to a 1 by clicking on it.

The change is nearly instant and you will hopefully see the relevant autohidden panel sneak a little further offscreen, setting the value to 0 (zero) will not have the desired effect incidently so stick to 1 please.


2 comments:

londonali1010+dragon_1930 said...

I always wondered about that last pixel on the auto-hide...How come KDE can do it, but not Gnome?

Do you know how to get rid of that last 1px?

SubBASS said...

Its not possible directly, we just have to be sneaky, such as match the panel colour to the background, use a background image with a transparent bottom row of pixels etc.

The handles on the bar can still be a problem as they remain more visible but they can be tweaked by using the .gtkrc file and a transparent png replacement. Described here http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1080704