Remove Titlebar on Maximized Windows with Compiz

I’m using the window-​​picker-​​applet from the Ubuntu Net­book theme, which pre­tends to be a title­bar for max­i­mized win­dows and pro­vides an icon-​​style taskbar. Since my screen isn’t tiny, I won’t run all my win­dows max­i­mized. But when I do, I want the window’s title­bar to dis­ap­pear, since it’s mostly wasted space.

You can add a rule to Com­piz to hide the title­bar on max­i­mized win­dows. Here’s how:

Open the com­piz con­fig panel (it’s called ccsm; install it if you don’t have it already (sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager). Go to “Win­dow Decorations”.

The next to last line is “Dec­o­ra­tion Win­dows”. The default is “any”, which means that any win­dow gets decoration. 

We want to turn off dec­o­ra­tion for max­i­mized win­dows. So we’re going to replace any with !state=maxvert.

This removes win­dow dec­o­ra­tions for win­dows that are max­i­mized ver­ti­cally (nor­mal max­i­miza­tion is actu­ally ver­ti­cal max­i­miza­tion (“maxvert”) and hor­i­zon­tal max­i­miza­tion (“maxhorz”)).

There you have it–your max­i­mized win­dows don’t have any title­bars. If you need to do any­thing with them (min­i­mize, close, etc), you can use Alt+space and then hit the hotkey for what­ever you want: n=minimize; x=unmaximize; c=close; etc.