Tech Blog

I have a wide screen laptop, but I want to get as much vertical space as possible. Here are some of the things I did for that purpose.

• Removed one of the panels. I removed the bottom panel. To retain the list of opened windows I added window list applet to top panel. The trash applet also you can add to top panel. For switching the desktop I uses keyboard short cuts (Ctrl+Alt+Arrow), so that is not a problem


• Reduced size of the panel. By default gnome panel does not reduce the size after a limit(24pixels I remember). If you want to reduce more than that limit, you have to reduce the font size and icon size. I set my application font size to 8px. For reducing icon size I did a hack I got somewhere from internet. Go to the Icons directory you r currently using(either in /usr/share/icons/< icontheme>/ or .icons/< icontheme>/). Rename the 24x24 directory to something else. Create a new link to 16x16 with the name 24x24. Then I could considerably reduce the panel size. U can see that the top panel is enough to include all opened windows. A small panel looks better than a bigger one


• For a nicer look I added a awn dock and put it in auto hide option so that it won't cover opened applications.