Disable GTK3 window management

Some GTK3 programs, such as file-roller and Evince, use their own custom title bar with minimize, maximize and close buttons. Under Xfce, I have experienced hiccups with Evince when maximized: it would refuse to unmaximize the window (or rather, does not remember the dimensions of the unmaximized window) and behaves kinda “sticky” to desktop borders. In another case, if I have the compositor turned off, the window edges are not smoothened and look ugly.

Here’s what I am talking about, this is how file-roller looks:

I recently came across gtk3-nocsd, a small module used to disable the client side decoration of GTK3. It can be easily installed from SBo.

Now, I can start a GTK3 program like this:

gtk3-nocsd file-roller

To make it the default for all GTK3 programs, I followed the instructions by the author and added these to my .bashrc on a Slackware64 14.2 system:

export GTK_CSD=0
export LD_PRELOAD="/usr/lib64/libgtk3-nocsd.so.0"

I boot in runlevel 3 and start Xfce by simply typing startx. I had to log out and in for the changes to take effect. When I boot into runlevel 4 with a login manager such as LXDM, this approach has no effect. Instead, I had to put the above lines in my .profile, as advised here.

Here:

That’s it!