Draggable window borders too narrow in greybird

[seahen]

In the greybird, greybird-compat and smallscreen themes, the portion of a window border that can be dragged to resize the window is only one pixel wide. Clicking a one-pixel border on a 1280x1024 screen is tricky even for an able-bodied young man like me using a mouse, and would be impossible on a netbook or tablet. This is likely to be a turnoff for new Xubuntu users, since greybird is the default theme.

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

thanks for your bugreport.
this was a conscious design decision – at first the border was 2px wide, which made it (though only) slightly easier to grab.

with the system-wide introduction of resize-grips we rethought the 2px design and made the window-border 1px wide, since resize-grips are far easier to grab than even a 2px border. furthermore you can also resize windows on the top corners.
last but not least there are keyboard-shortcuts in xfwm4 to initiate a window-resize: holding alt and right-clicking/dragging a window resizes it.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

We are also planning Greybird-accessibility, which should include larger window borders for example. I hope we can build the accessibility version before Precise, as well as be asking the user to either use accessibility packages (including Greybird-a11y) or not, at installation.

[Matthew (astrochase)]

This bug persists in 12.04.

Is it possible to create a wider invisible "virtual border" that is easier to grip? The workarounds do exist, but sometimes I just want to resize from only the left edge (without using a corner, which makes it harder not to change the height of the window) which is extremely difficult at present.

[Pasi Lallinaho (knome)]

Matthew, the Alt+right-click method will change only the width of a window if you start the right-click-drag from the vertically middle area of the left side of the window.

[Simon Steinbeiß (ochosi)]

Keyboard shortcuts also allow resizing only horizontally.
I know that the window-borders issue is of concern to many users, that's why I put together the methods for window-resizing recently: http://xubuntu.org/news/window-resizing-in-xubuntu-and-xfce/

(As this is a design decision, not a bug, I'll keep it as wontfix.)

[Kevin Seifert (sevkeifert)]

I couldn't get used to using the alt-mouse method, so I just increased the border size to 4px on my system :)

http://sevkeifert.blogspot.com/2014/12/increase-window-border-size-in-xubuntu.html