REAL:LY Quick and Easy Title Bar Button Side Switching

[ALIENDUDE5300]

A ton of users are dissatisfied with the decision to change the buttons on the title bar, however, it's incredibly easy to change back and forth between the old (Karmic) look, and the new (Lucid Alpha) look. You do not have to be on Lucid to test out the new look. These commands work fine on Karmic and (probably) older, although I have only tested them on Karmic and Lucid.

The fix is ridiculously simple. First, open up a terminal.

If you want your Title Bar icons to look like they do in Karmic (RIGHT side), copy and paste the following code into the Terminal and press Enter:

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string ":minimize,maximize,close"

If you want your Title Bar icons to look like they do in Lucid Alpha (LEFT side), copy and paste the following code into the Terminal and press Enter:

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "maximize,minimize,close:"

It really is that easy. You're done! Enjoy!

[bu3askoor]

i got this strange error:

Error setting value: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/ for information. (Details - 1: Failed to get connection to session: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.)

I am on ubuntu 9.10

[rawny]

Cool tip, thanks!

It's worth mentioning that on Karmic, your command will get rid of the application menu/icon (at the left end of the titlebar), which I believe is there by default.

To prevent that, try this instead:

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/metacity/general/button_layout" --type string "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

I don't know how this will behave on Lucid though, I only have Karmic.

[Mervaka]

works a treat, cheers!

rawny: the menu: bit works fine too.

[Naggobot]

Thank you!

Worked like a charm

I bookmarked this on the post day and upgraded to day