Yesterday I announced that I have been testing Elementary OS Luna. So far I’m really loving it but as with most things, nothing is perfect and the lack of a minimise button on windows was really starting to irritate me. So, I went to my trusty friend Google to see if they had any advice on how to resolve this issue.
Unfortunately, with Elementary OS Luna being a development release there isn’t much info out there on it yet. So, I went to work trying to figure it out for myself and with about 20 minutes of free time and some common sense, I managed to work it out. The result isn’t perfect but I now have a minimise button and I can also manage what side of the window my buttons are displayed (coming from a Windows background I prefer them on the right).
Here is what a typical default window look like in Elementary OS Luna. Note that the maximise button is on the far right and the close button on the left. By default to minimise a window you have to click on an applications corresponding icon in plank (the panel at the bottom of the screen).
So after five minutes of tweaking here is what I have now:
As you can see, my window management icons are now both on the right hand side but there is no minimise icon displayed. But it is there I assure you. The reason it’s not displayed (I think) is because the guys at Elementary HQ didn’t want a minimise button and therefore didn’t write one into the theme. However, if you click on the part of the window where the minimise button should be, the window will now minimise.
What you need to change
All you need to do is open up “dconf editor” from the application menu and navigate down the tree on the left hand side of the window to the following path org > pantheon > desktop > gala > appearance. Once there, all you need to do is change the “Button-Layout” field from it’s default value of “close:maximize” to “:minimize,maximize,close” (all without quotes).
This will move all three buttons over to the right of the window. If you want them on the left then simply change the text to “close,maximize,minimize” (no colon required) instead. How it works is if you imagine the colon to be the centre of the window; anything to the left of it will appear on the left hand side and anything to the right of the colon will appear to the right. All you need to do then is simple arrange the words close, maximise & minimize, separated by commas with no spaces into the order that you wish them to be displayed on the window.
Finally, just to prove to you guys that the minimise button is in fact working (although no icon unfortunately) here is a quick video:
