OSX style top-panel in XFCE?

Question

I stumbled across this screenshot of a person running XFCE:

I noticed that the persons top-panel bar was OSX-like. What I mean is that the top-left has the focused application's name, while the top-right of the panel has the standard top-panel widgets and icons (time, Wi-FI etc) before the maximize/minimize and close buttons.

I'm trying to figure out how this was achieved? I recently migrated from OSX and would like the same kind of setup.

Source: taken from here, confirming that he's running XFCE not some other.

Solution

If you're using Xubuntu, the panel should already be on top, with the window buttons on the left and the indicators on the right. If not, you can add a top panel like this by:

1. Search in the menu for "panel" or use xfce4-settings-manager and click "Panel"
2. Click the plus (+) button to add a new panel
3. Set the length to 100% so it takes up the whole length of the screen
4. You may want to reduce the row size because the default (48) is pretty thick
5. Drag the panel by the left or right edge to the top of the screen
6. Check "Lock Panel"
7. Click the "Items" tab
8. Click the plus (+) button to add new items
9. Add "Window Buttons", "Separator", "Notification Area", "Power Manager Plugin", "Indicator Plugin", and "Clock" (This is just a suggestion. There are plenty of other items you can add if you wish)
10. Go back to the "Panel" window, click the Separator and click the settings button
11. Check "Expand" so that the icons will be on the right

If you want to make the side panel with icons, it's a pretty similar process:

1. Search in the menu for "panel" or use xfce4-settings-manager and click "Panel"
2. Click the plus (+) button to add a new panel
3. Set the mode to "Vertical"
4. If you want it to auto-hide, change automatically hide to "Always"
5. Drag the panel by the top or bottom edge to the left of the screen
6. Click the "Items" tab
7. Click the plus (+) button to add new items
8. Add a launcher for each application
9. Go back to the "Panel" window, click the Launcher and click the settings button
10. Click the plus (+) button to add an application
11. Repeat 10. and 11. for each application
12. You may want to center the panel again now by dragging it
13. Back at the display tab, check "Lock Panel"

Remember this is more of a baseline to making it look more like the screenshot. Xfce panels are pretty configurable, so you can try customizing it to your preference.

Comments

[xangua]

Xfwm4 has an option to hide window decorations when a window is maximized, and that's probably the "window list button" item.

[xangua]

If you're interested in getting a OSX like panel, you can try topmenu (only works for gtk apps) webupd8.org/2016/05/…