Titlebar buttons/elements clickable/focusable also acting on window top margin

[Marco_Savelli]

As a usability feature, I’d like to have buttons (esp. tab buttons) in the titlebar (windows control buttons included) to be clickable and focusable also when the user clicks/mousemoves on top of the button, when the window is maximized.

Basically, extend the button to click/focus also on the top margin between the button and the window top border

So when the window is maximized, I can move the mouse to the top without much precision and still be able to action those buttons, instead of being forced to do that more slowly and precisely on the exact border of the button.

Firefox already does it with tabs buttons on top and it’s much more user-friendly to be able to not care if you’re on the exact button or in the top border.
As said, we’d need to do that also for the window control buttons (close, minimize, maximize). See Windows for example: it’s pretty nice to smash the mouse on the top right corner of the window and close the windows faster.

GTK-3/libhandy had bigger tabs buttons that spanned the whole titlebar height, and that was much easier to use cause you could do what I can’t do now with the new GTK-4 look.

[Marco_Savelli]

No discussion on this?

[andyholmes]

I’m not sure what discussion you were looking for.

It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable proposition, but I’m not sure how/where you wanting this to be applied? Are you proposing this be adopted as part of the HIG, or as de-facto behaviour in GTK and/or libadwaita?

Is this something that third-party developers will have the ability to choose or choose not to implement for their own applications? I’m not sure it’s possible to enforce this, even at the API or behaviour level.

[dboles]

With user CSS you should be able to override the height/margin/etc of title buttons, just need slightly different selectors in GTK4.