The CSD Initiative Is Pushing For Apps To Abandon Title Bars In Favor Of Header Bars

GNOME developer Tobias Bernard has announced "The CSD Initiative" in a push for more applications to support client-side decorations and as part of that to abandon boring title bars in favor of modern header bars.

By using client-side decorations (CSD) rather than server-side decorations, applications are able to draw their own title/header bars and that makes for more interesting possibilities to save precious screen real estate and be more innovative about packing additional functionality into what otherwise would be a rather empty bar on the screen.

Most GNOME applications that are ported to GTK3 tend to already support header bars, but a lot of software out there that is used daily on the Linux desktop does not. Tobias Bernard acknowledges this initiative won't be easy as in some cases it requires the application moving from e.g. GTK2 to GTK3 in order to support CSD and header bars. In other cases, an application may need to be restructured but for other applications it may not be too much of a challenge.

Besides doing away with the title bar, other goals for the CSD Initiative is to always have native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons, respect other settings for showing of those icons, and respect the setting for whether these buttons should be on the left or right side of a window.

More details on this initiative via Tobias Bernard's blog post.