Is there any way to stop a window's title bar merging with the panel when maximised?

Solution 1:

You can disable window maximize to title bar when a titlebar is dragged near to the Unity Top/Superior bar.

Visit: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1743309 ( Note post #6 by stevecomrie )

• Open CompizConfig Settings Manager
• Click on the "Grid" in the "Window Management" category
• Click on the "Edges" tab
• Open the "Resize Actions" drop down
• Change the "Top Edge" drop down to "None"
• Close CompizConfig and you're all done.

This is only a partial solution. Some applications will still launch themselves into the merged state when you run them. And, you can still inadvertantly cause a merge by double-clicking on the title bar of an an unmerged application. Anybody with a clue as to how to completely disable any and all variations of unity panel merging with an application's title bar would be appreciated!

Solution 2:

For Unity 3D, you can try this script.

Basically it will check for maximized windows and will demaximize them and resize them to the max width height possible (that after you make tests you find it to be working well on your machine); play also with nXpos and nYpos if you feel something is not working fine.

demaximize.sh 1005 710 #for 1024x768 that works here at least...

#!/bin/bash

# make tests to your system, this works 'here' at 1024x768
nWidth=$1 #1005
nHeight=$2 #710
nXpos=1
nYpos=22

while true; do 
    windowId=`xdotool getactivewindow`;
    if xwininfo -wm -id $windowId |tr -d '\n' |grep -q "Maximized Vert.*Horz";then
        wmctrl -i -r $windowId -b toggle,maximized_vert,maximized_horz;
        xdotool windowsize $windowId $nWidth $nHeight;
        xdotool windowmove $windowId $nXpos $nYpos;
        xdotool getwindowname $windowId
    fi; 
    sleep 0.5;
done

PS.: for chrome/chromium work better, enable "use system title and borders" option

Solution 3:

ctrl + alt 5 seems to be your best bet as of right now. Sorry. Perhaps to remove temptation you could remove the maximize button in Ubuntu-Tweak but as of right now if you maximize the window, it simply will merge the titlebar with the menubar

Solution 4:

Source: http://ubuntuguide.net/unity-2d-how-to-removeenable-maximized-window-titlebar

This can be handled by gconftool. If you have the GUI frontend "gconf-edtor" installed, just launch it and navigate to /apps/metacity/general, then un-check “show_maximized_titlebars” to remove the maximized window titlebar.

Or, you can execute this command in terminal to remove it:

gconftool --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/show_maximized_titlebars false

Run this to re-enable it:

gconftool --type bool --set /apps/metacity/general/show_maximized_titlebars true