Fixing the small title bar text in GNOME with Compiz enabled
29 May 2008
If you’re running GNOME and have enabled Compiz effects, you may have noticed that title bar text – the descriptions at the top of windows – have inexplicably got smaller. This problem is especially relevant and noticeable in Linux Mint and other Ubuntu-based distributions, as I learned when setting up a machine for my Mom to use. You can see an example of the small/broken title bar text size below. (This was with the default settings)
A quick fix would be just to increase the title bar font size in the appearance settings, but this would result in larger-than-normal title bar text if you were to disable the Compiz effects. This smaller text is actually a slight bug, and can be fixed by entering the command compiz --version in the terminal. After doing this, you’ll see the title bar text increase back to the normal size – invoking compiz seems to cause the manager to reset the size back. However, the changes do not persist after a reboot or after logging back in and it’s impractical to have to do this every time.
As with all tedious tasks, the best way to accomplish them is with a script. Here’s a nice workaround.