It isn’t that you were in such dire need, I was just suggesting a personalization option for you. It’s more a case of wanting to re-invent the wheel when previous works exist that would fit your suggestion, even with some minor tweaks.
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I think a green instead of an orange close button would provide a nicer consistency throughout Ubuntu MATE, too. Of course a professional new standard theme for Ubuntu MATE would be very nice to see indeed. And we already have a good start with the theme improvements made for 17.04 
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@motivation, what elements do you associate with a new “professional” theme? 
This has crossed my mind in the past – and there’s also this topic:
17.04 has had its themes improved, this should continue into 17.10’s development too. I’ll make sure there’s a discussion on this small change. 
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Beyond the button colour, the active area should really stretch to the entire corner, so that if your panel layout is set to not have an upper panel, and your window is maximized, you can literally just sweep the mouse to the top right corner, and click, without having to attend to hitting the exact button area (it’s currently a few pixels short of the edge).
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@orschiro, mainly consistency in look throughout all applications. Then of course a fitting colour scheme and a decent icon theme. But mainly consistency in look: What I would not like for example, is a mix between traditional styled and modern gnome 3 styled applications. As far as I have seen, in 17.04 there is a more consistent scrollbar theme, as well as some improved icon themes for applications (e.g. mate-calculator) and better theming with qt4 and qt5 applications.
I am sorry, I do not understand. What do you want to tell me?
I responded to your question above
[quote=“BrokenCanoe, post:12, topic:12519, full:true”]
Beyond the button colour, the active area should really stretch to the entire corner, so that if your panel layout is set to not have an upper panel, and your window is maximized, you can literally just sweep the mouse to the top right corner, and click, without having to attend to hitting the exact button area (it’s currently a few pixels short of the edge).
[/quote]Completely agree! One of the things I noticed while comparing Ubuntu MATE with other distributions. Closing a maximised Firefox window (or other maximised window) is accomplished with ease on some distributions without need to search for a Close button.
@lah7, What are your thoughts?
For that matter, why not make the button change with the system highlight color? Or give it its own separate option or something. That way we wouldn’t need to take up lots of disk space with new themes that are 99% the same. And we’d be able to choose more than the 13 or so colors in the mentioned PPA.
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I wonder if different window managers handle the click area differently? But if it’s technically possible and a “theme thing” then it should be considered.
Damn, if this is possible this would be awesome from an usability standpoint.
It’s how things work in Windows at least, - the clickable area of the X spans the entire corner. Would love to see this happen in Mate, it may require some recoding of the window decoration function however.
Thank you all for this very fruitful and engaging conversations!
What conclusions can we take from here?
Is there anything of the ideas discussed above that we can somehow implement in the near future?
Happy Easter!
In response to people wanting a bigger hitbox for the close button, you can install Emerald standalone from an older Ubuntu repo and use that to decorate non-CSD windows with.
Therein lies one problem; GNOME’s Context-Sensitive decoration doesn’t respect Emerald. Also, for some reason mailcap gets messed because of how the emerald theme mimetype is handled during install, couldn’t find a resolution for that, otherwise it works. That, or, y’know, at the risk of sounding like an boob, learn to press <Alt> + <F4>? 
Yes I know it was a joke, but it might be worth your noting that not every user is fully functional or able-bodied in the same way that you might be. I’m one of those users. Some control options are inherently easier than others.
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I created some green icons, take a look!
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