Can I hack the Window Control Button Size?

Support & Help Requests
#1

Is it possible to make the window control button size bigger ? I had some success at the back end of 2016 in converting my Wife from Windows 10 to Ubuntu-Mate (16.04) She has one issue at present in that she has difficult discerning the window control buttons on a Full HD laptop screen. She’s slightly partially sighted, I’ve scaled up all fonts for her, but the window control buttons remain at their original size. The image post was created on my laptop demonstrating the problem. I’ve logged a bug, but in the interim is there a hack I could do to increase the button size ?

Here’s an image created on my laptop demonstrating the problem:

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Can I change the Minimise, Maximise and Close Window button size
Can I change the Minimise, Maximise and Close Window button size
#2

I believe window controls are provided by themes. Like, the High Contrast themes have slightly larger window buttons already.

You might be able to make them larger by scaling the PNG images for one of the themes – this is the default theme, Ambiant-MATE:

  • /usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE/metacity-1
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#3

Hi lah7
Thanks for the pointer, have made some progress. I can customise the buttons, but they seem to be sitting behind the window title bar with a letter box aperture. Any idea where the title bar image lives ?

I started by making the minimise button twice as big and substiting for all there varients of the focused button:

Thanks

#4

My guess is the trough_* files. The rest of the hackery magic is stored as config inside the theme. Take a look inside metacity-theme-1.xml, as it has some values related to the height/width of the window’s buttons too:

 <distance name="button_width" value="18"/>
 <distance name="button_height" value="20"/>

/usr/share/themes/Ambiant-MATE/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

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