Why are there pipe characters '|' and square bracket characters '[' ']' in my Cinnamon window names? How to disable them?

Question

I was puzzled why there were pipe and square bracket characters in my Cinnamon window titles in the panel.

Eg. Firefox window title showing as "| Firefox" or "[ Firefox ]"

Why are they there, and how to disable?

Answer 1

A Cinnamon desktop applet adds special characters to show the status of the Windows.

• minimized window: [ name ]
• tiled window: | name
• snapped window: || name

If you want to remove these special characters from the window names:

1. Create a backup of this file then edit it (you'll need root access):

/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/[email protected]/applet.js

2. Look for the word TILED to find the right part of the code
3. Comment out the window title changes you don't want.

If you don't want any of the special characters, comment out the whole block with /* */, like this:

/*
            if (this.metaWindow.minimized) {
                title = "["+ title +"]";
            } else if (this.metaWindow.tile_type == Meta.WindowTileType.TILED) {
                title = "|"+ title;
            }
            else if (this.metaWindow.tile_type == Meta.WindowTileType.SNAPPED) {
                title = "||"+ title;
            }
*/

4. Restart Cinnamon - press ALT+F2, enter 'r', and press enter.

Your window names shouldn't contain any special characters now.