So if Title Bars are back for all detached Unity windows, then at least make them more useful and I think less people would have reason to complain… I often chuck all the detached windows grouped up to a single window to hold them and throw them on another screen out of the way but still visually there for when I need access them… However as is the case with Unity you sometimes need to have multiple instances open to work on things more efficiently and that is when this becomes a mess.
Is a lack of options and built in features for Unity to improve the editor and frankly I think you should be able to choose what is shown on these detached title bars, it just looks stupid having example ‘Project Manager’ directly about the tab with the same title, or whatever the active tab is… at least with a custom Title for the Window you can add a few more actual useful bits of textual information… like the Project Title or the Unity Version! or more options to add our own custom ones like %ActiveScene% etc… Save us some visual time clicking them and potentially on the wrong window then messing about trying to get the right one in view.
Agreed. These native title bars are important to have as affordances for usability, accessibility and operating system consistency, so they aren’t going away and should have always been there. Might as well make the title bar text meaningful, useful and customizable.
Funny you should say that because literally no app I use regularly has native toolbar. Probably because its ugly and and wates space
Opera, Spotify, VSCode, Rider, github desktop, telegram, discord. Even opened Visual Studio and yeah, still custom. Unity is the only one insisting on using “the ugly bar”.
I say we must continue complaining until they stop being lazy and implement proper bar on their main platform for god’s sake
I don’t know… reason was probably buried somewhere in a past alpha beta subforum in a thread no one will ever see again… I’m just gonna blame it on Windows deteriorating and being lobotomized to the levels of the crapple mac osx desktop ux…shudders …eergh …it’s bit like people who like a taskbar with centered icon only buttons instead of classic small button with description app text task bar left aligned and then combines if full… I suppose window telemetry told them most there userbase barely past monkey iq and thus decided dumb it all down for masses with apple ux being the defacto standard to reduce things towards and gimp the api’s.
or maybe it had something to do with various linux desktop distros which are still barely past windows xp ux standards.
Some people wanted and wants proper windows for our workflows like having a separate title in the taskbar for child windows so when you switch back and forth between an outside app and a “tear-out window”, you don’t need to go through the main Unity window, it would have allowed to have a separate entry for the child window.
The problem is, that other people hate the idea, like yourself, so now Unity is being Unity and instead of doing the sensible thing they half-ass back a little so nobody is happy. What they could do to make everyone happy? Put a fricking setting in the preferences for people to choose which workflow they want.
This (was) the elegant and simple original version:
It doesn’t take up any additional space, and before anyone says I should get a bigger monitor or multiple monitors, I already use an ultrawide display and two auxiliary monitors and the funny thing about UI-space monsters like me is that we hate to see any speck of space that we paid for (buying extra monitors) going to waste to extra titlebars.
Also, with browsers like Google Chrome / Brave they can show multi-tabbed interfaces that don’t have an extra title bar:
And if you tear out a window/tab, it has its own entry in the task manager:
Anyways not all is lost. Here’s an autohotkey script that I whipped up that can toggle the titlebar of ANY window, Unity or otherwise, and can also be used to set the Always On Top flag:
#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
#Persistent
#SingleInstance force
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 255
#`:: Winset, Alwaysontop, , A ; Toggles AlwaysOnTop flag
#!Up::
WinSet, Style, ^0xC00000, A ; Toggle the active window's title bar (WS_CAPTION).
WinHide, WinTitle
WinShow, WinTitle
return
#!Left:: WinSet, ExStyle, ^0x80, A ; Toggle the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW attribute, which removes/adds the window from the alt-tab list.
Use Win+Tilde to toggle AlwaysOnTop
Use Win+Alt+Up to toggle the title bar and save precious screen space. If you toggle the titlebar, you won’t be able to grab and move it, so you’ll have to toggle the titlebar again when you want to move it.
Win+Alt+Left was an experiment to toggle making the window show in the alt+tab list but it doesn’t work on Unity.
That’s only the part where the extra windows appear on the task bar or not. Turning it off doesn’t turn off the title bars of the windows.
I know well how Unity looks like, thanks and I don’t argue that other software looks better than Unity. Frankly, I don’t care who uses what software how as long as I get any option (even if it’s in the preferences) to use the way it makes sense to me. So, I really don’t argue with you that you shouldn’t get what you want. I’m just saying, it was broken, it is not true that it wasn’t. Nothing more.
