Since a few months I’ve done away with using the Gnome main menu. Instead I use Gnome Do. I removed the bottom toolbar long ago, because always use alt-tab.
I’m not using the top toolbar much either. It was just taking up valuable screen space. I contains only the notification area and a logout button. I was looking at a way to remove it completely. The answer came in the Compiz widget layer. By placing it on the widget layer, fullsize windows actually fill the full screen, but the notification area is still available for applications who need it.
To move Gnome panel to the Widget layer, open ‘CompizConfig Settings Manager’ and enable ‘Widget Layer’. Go to tab ‘Behaviour’ and add the following text for the ‘Widget Windows’ field:
(class=Gnome-panel & type=Dock)
The desktop will now be completely clean:
With
PS. The widgets you see on the widget layer are screenlets. Ubuntu has the screenlets package in the universe repository.
Hey I followed all the instructions here and my gnome panel is still not ‘in the widget layer’ as far as I can tell.
What else do you have to do ? restart maybe, after making the changes with ccsm ??
Todd: You shouldn’t need to restart, the change should instantly move the panel to the widget layer. Make sure the widget layer is enabled.
If this doesn’t work, click on the big ‘+’ behind the ‘Widget Windows’ field. Select ‘Type’ is ‘Window class’ and press the ‘Grab’ button behind the ‘Value’ field. Click on the toolbar with the cross-hair. The ‘Value’ field should get a value. Than click on ‘Add’.
I added the ‘type=Dock’ entry because don’t want the menu to appear in the widget layer when I press Super+F1. You can omit this though.
Excellent tip!! Thanks for the simple guide to truly hiding the gnome-panel without removing it.
Thanks a lot for your tip ^^!
This seems to not work on 10.04 without installing compiz-fusion-plugins-extra. Even then it disables windows switching whilst the thing is active. The method I’ve been forced to use is to write a shell script to tell gconf-editor to auto-hide or remove auto-hide from the panels and link this to a button through a command.
Is there any way to get widgets working in 10.04?
Been trying for ages to find a way to completely remove it. Most people accept a single line of pixels when you use auto-hide, but it drives me crazy. This is such a clean solution.
It`s great solution. thanks