Client-Side Decoration

CSD on Evince

Client-Side Decoration (CSD) is the concept of combinating a title bar, menu bar and tool bar in one horizontal bar in order to give more space to application content, reducing the amount of wasted space by showing a virtually empty title bar, at the cost of making the UI inconsistent between programs, and making window manager interactions like maximizing or closing a window impossible for misbehaving programs.

CSD on gThumb

The term client-side comes from X Window System terminology, where a client is an application which renders a window and sends it to the X server. Under Wayland, different compositors implement support for either client side decorations or server side decorations. An example implementation is GNOME, where all window decorations are client-side (even when they have traditional bars).[1].

By using client-side decorations (CSD) rather than server-side decorations, applications are able to draw their own title/header bars, which has been argued to save screen real estate and possibly packing additional functionality into what otherwise would be a rather empty bar on the screen.[2]

This approach has caused widespread controversy between Linux users, with some polls like one on-going poll by OMG! Ubuntu! showing most voters (42%) are fan and prefer all apps use it, 32% are partially agree on, 16% are against[3] while some discussions showing strong consensus against CSD[4].

GNOME and its tool-kit GTK, are the leaders of this concept on the Linux platform.

History

GNOME introduced CSDs in 2011 with the release of GNOME Shell 3 and GtkHeaderBar widget.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Bernard, Tobias. "Introducing the CSD Initiative – Space and Meaning". GNOME. Retrieved 2018-01-28.
  2. ↑ "The CSD Initiative Is Pushing For Apps To Abandon Title Bars In Favor Of Header Bars - Phoronix". Phoronix. Retrieved 2018-01-28.
  3. ↑ "Do You Like Linux Apps That Use Client Side Decorations? [Poll]". OMG! Ubuntu!. Retrieved 2018-01-28.
  4. ↑ "Should Apps Replace Title Bars with Header Bars?". Retrieved 2018-02-03.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.