Remove title-bar of all maximized windows in GNOME 3

Solution 1:

There's a much easier way than editing config files - simply add Pixel saver extension to get rid of the title bar and reclaim your screen space.

It has the added benefit that you still get maximise/minimise buttons but these are now stowed away in the top panel.

I previously used Maximus but this seemed to break with gnome 3.8 - Maximus also use to give me issues with pop-up calendars for my bank but this extension play nicely with that too.

Solution 2:

A quick and simple fix for this can be found on webupd8. To test this quickly without much work, just launch:

gnomesu gedit /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml

Now find this next line, Ctrl+f to search, you want to be sure it is the line that reads name=max:

frame_geometry name="max"

change that so it looks like this:

frame_geometry name="max" has_title="false" 

Now restart the shell to view the changes, Alt+F2, type r, and Enter/Return.

To further customize this you should examine the above webupd8 article and make your changes carefully, or paste the entire contents of the frame_geometry style including everything between:

<frame_geometry name="max"...> ... </frame_geometry>

As you will see with the above edit, the entire title bar isn't gone, a small portion remains. But I did not make the other changes and the contents of that stylesheet differ between shell versions, read below for another change I tested. I am also running 3.8 though, so I went ahead and did some testing and I made one more change under frame_geometry=max I changed the following value from 8 to 0:

<distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="0"/>

You'll notice the difference now, and there's still a bit of a shadow left over, but it actually looks pretty good to me.

Solution 3:

Update from 2018: pixel-saver is pretty much abandoned project, as mentioned here

It also has a lot of open issues, like this.

But fortunatelly, we can install no-title-bar which works great and seems more active.