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Paul Knulst
Paul Knulst

Posted on • Originally published at paulsblog.dev

How To Unhide Titlebars on Maximised Windows in KDE Plasma 6

Maybe Unimportant For You But Mandatory For Me

Since I updated my Garuda Linux some days ago it switched from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6 which removed a Widget that I was using in my top panel: "Application Menu"

This led to a major problem (for me) if I maximized my applications because instead of an application menu the Global Menu Widget was used. This can be seen in the following screenshot while maximizing the Brave browser:

KDE Plasma 6 Global Menu If Window is Maximized<br>

The problem was that the Global Menu Widget missed some adjustments that I needed:

  • Extend the Menu to use the whole panel
  • Enable Double Click to reset Full Screen
  • Enable Click And Drag to move the Window to another screen maybe

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem because every application has its own title bar. Unfortunately, the default behavior for my installation of Garuda Linux was configured that if I maximized any Window it would hide the title bar which led to the problem that for some applications I couldn't minimize, move or close them through the top bar. See the marked spots on the following screenshot:

KDE Plasma 6 Global Menu If Window is Maximized With Unclickable Area

Note: If using a Panel with the Global Menu Widget and Window Buttons Widget (see screenshot) I would have the functionality to minimize, and close if using the buttons.

Fortunately, I found out that there exists a hidden setting in KWin that can be set to enable and also disable title bars and window borders if the application window is maximized.

To do this, I had to open the following file:

~/.config/kwinrc
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

In this file, I searched for the section [Windows] and changed the setting of BorderlessMaximizedWindows to false so that it looked like this:

[Windows]
BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

After logging out and logging in back again the title bars were available all the time and I could maximize on double click and move the window without any problems.

Image from https://imgflip.com/i/8jqu8y


As this was triggering me the last few days and I searched some days to fix this problem I decided to create a small post for everyone who will ever face this problem.

Also if you are one of these guys that do not want to have title bars at all, you can use this setting to remove them.

So I guess, it is important for everyone :)

This article was originally published on my blog at https://www.paulsblog.dev/how-to-unhide-titlebars-on-maximised-windows-in-kde-plasma-6/

Feel free to connect with me on my blog, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.


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Photo by master1305 / Freepik

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