[Oxygen] [Bug 425874] New: Shorter titlebar (without smaller font) option needed: less padding

[Duncan]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425874

            Bug ID: 425874
           Summary: Shorter titlebar (without smaller font) option needed:
                    less padding
           Product: Oxygen
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
                OS: Other
            Status: REPORTED
          Severity: wishlist
          Priority: NOR
         Component: win deco
          Assignee: unassigned-bugs at kde.org
          Reporter: 1i5t5.duncan at cox.net
  Target Milestone: ---

So this is a follow-on to bug #425864, an aurorae-based windecos bug.  As I
worked on that bug I realized once again the reason I was running an
aurorae-based windeco in the first place -- I needed a relatively short-height
titlebar without forcing the font to microscopic in ordered to get it.  Put
differently, oxygen and breeze are both far too empty-space
vertical-padding-heavy for users who like titlebars but don't want to /waste/
space, with no option other than hacking the code itself to reduce padding to
something reasonable for a minimal-height titlebar just tall enough to fit the
chosen font size.

Years ago I found an aurorae-based windeco (black square) on kde-look that was
quite close to what I wanted/needed, and being aurorae-based, finding and
editing the height to cut just a couple extra pixels was relatively simple. 
While aurorae-based did mean it lacked some of the fancy options that breeze
and oxygen had, it did what I needed and worked fine for years... until my
distro (Gentoo) decided to switch to libglvnd for automatic handling of the
opengl driver, thus triggering the unfortunate 100% transparent titlebars bug
with aurorae-based windecos I just mentioned, above.

It turned out that neither the oxygen nor breeze windecos had that bug, but
they still had the horribly fat vertical-padding issue that had driven me to
looking for alternatives on the then kde-look in the first place, alternatives
that were almost all aurorae-based.

So here I am filing this bug, wanting some option to reduce the vertical
padding for oxygen/breeze, so I can get back those fancy titlebar effects
without wasting all that empty space real window content can put to better use!

Now I'm running gentoo so build from sources all the time, and for
kde-frameworks/plasma/apps I run the live-git versions from the gentoo/kde
overlay and regularly bisect and file bugs, etc.  So applying patches locally
isn't a big deal, and while I'm not a dev, occasionally, especially when
pointed at the right place by a commit, I can modify or create my own patches
that do what I want to do.

In this case I didn't have commits to point my way, but finding where and
patching Oxygen to "reduce the fat" turned out to be far easier as a
git-literate advanced gentooer but never-the-less non-dev, than figuring out
how to patch aurorae to fix the bug with it!  So that's what I did, I
hack-patched oxygen, reducing the titlebar vertical padding so I could have a
reasonably sized actually readable font (8pt Noto Sans)... and still limit my
titlebars to the 15 px high I was using on black-square with the same font!  I
knew was possible because I /did/ have black-square doing it, and after a long
day of hack-patching, I finally had the oxygen windeco doing the same thing. 
By contrast, without the patches even the absolute minimum and totally
unreadable 4 pt font size was heavier weight height-wise, and anything readable
was effectively double the height, 30 px or more!

A couple days later, to my surprise, I found that the hack-patches I had only
applied to oxygen reduced the fat-padding on breeze as well, and it too could
now handle 8 pt Noto Sans titlebar fonts at 15 px titlebar height.

Now these are only hack-patches; I'm not a dev and
don't-know-how/didn't-bother-to-try-to-figure-out-how, to setup proper padding
options.  But I figure if I found these useful enough to spend 12-hours plus
reading and experimentally hack-patching to get it to work, surely, there's
others out there that could use the same features I hack-patched, especially if
all they have to do is spend a few seconds to select an option to get them.

So that's what I'm asking for, the option.  I'll upload my hack-patches so you
can see exactly what I changed, and hopefully, proper patches to do the same
thing with options aren't too much trouble, and don't violate the guidelines
badly enough that they can't at least be made options.

Else if it's simply too far out of policy, now that I have the hack-patches I
can keep hack-patching for my own needs with little further trouble, any
maintenance will after all have git commits pointing the way, unlike these
initial hack-patches, but surely, some others will find the option useful, if
it's there for them to find at all. =:^)

See also bug #418904 (filed by someone else), but that's style/widgets not
titlebar/windeco.

Demo hack-patches to come, but it's a few days after my 12+ hour hackathon, and
on pre-posting second-look I decided I've a couple further small tweaks to test
and comments to tweak, first.

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