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GNOME extension to hide the top bar except in overview mode

About Hide Top Bar

This GNOME extension helps to hide GNOME's top bar when it gets into your way.

In the extension's preferences, different behaviors can be specified: unhiding on mouse-over or on pressing a keyboard shortcut, or when no window requires the space.

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Installation from extensions.gnome.org

Unless you are on Debian or Ubuntu (see section below), the recommended way of installing Hide Top Bar is via the official builds on extensions.gnome.org/.../hide-top-bar/.

If you're installing via a Chrome browser, make sure you read the GNOME Shell integration for Chrome Installation Guide.

Debian

If you are using a Debian based distribution, the preferred installation method is to use the packaged version. By this, compatibility problems caused by different gnome-shell versions in your distribution can be avoided. You can install the package with:

sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-autohidetopbar

If you find problems with the Debian packaged version, please file bugs at the Debian Bugtracking system.

Installation from source

If you insist on installing from source, the commands xgettext and msgfmt from the gettext package (package name may vary depending on your distribution) are required.

The procedure to install from source is as follows: Check out the source code into your local extensions directory, compile by running make, install and restart GNOME Shell. For example:

cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/
git clone https://github.com/tuxor1337/hidetopbar.git [email protected]
cd [email protected]
make
cd ..
gnome-extensions enable [email protected]
gnome-shell --replace &

The last command restarts GNOME Shell.

Updating the language strings

Whenever you notice that there are localizable strings in Hide Top Bar that are not covered by the strings in ./locale/, you can regenerate the *.pot-file using the following command:

make ./locale/hidetopbar.pot

To then incorporate the changes to the actual translation files for each language, run one of the following commands:

make all-po                                 # For updating the files for all languages
make ./locale/XX/LC_MESSAGES/hidetopbar.po  # For updating one specific po file, where 'XX' is the language code

As mentioned in the previous section, running make requires the gettext package to be installed (the package names may vary depending on your distribution).

Troubleshooting

Can I assign a shortcut to temporally disable the autohiding altogether?

Follow the instructions to assign a system-wide shortcut that disables/enables the extension.

Notification pop-ups cause the top bar to hide.

Using the extension Panel OSD, you can configure notification pop-ups to show up in a different position (e.g. a few pixels down) where they won't overlap with the top bar.

The panel overlaps with the dash/dock.

This is an issue of the extension Dash to Dock, see also this comment.

License

Copyright (c) 2013-2022 Thomas Vogt.

Copyright (c) 2012-2013 Mathieu Lutfy.

Copyright (c) 2012 Philip Witte.

Hide Top Bar is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Hide Top Bar is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Hide Top Bar (see COPYING.txt). If not, see gnu.org/licenses/.