Reclaim Screen Space: How to gut the UI?

[Lord Tim]

The biggest problem with what the OP was suggesting was there's a LOT of the UI that can be folded away and hidden until you need it that takes up FAR more screen real estate than what he was suggesting losing, plus the things he suggested cutting out are kind of important for actually making the program work. If you remove the scrollbars, for example, how do you navigate around your project? A lot of the menus that he was suggesting should be cut out are project specific rather than global menus, so it'd force you to remember a bunch of key commands, and you'd have no visual indicator that something was active or not (anyone who uses Ripple Edit a lot will know what a good day it was when we got the indicator icon). You lose core functionality to save a tiny amount of space.

This isn't Cakewalk bias, as much as we're obviously here because this is our DAW of choice and are comfortable with the workflow, there's some very logical reasons that some of this stuff is actually in there and can't be removed. Like I said, you could get rid of 30 or 40 pixels worth of borders, scrollbars and menus... or... you could fold away great chunks of the UI and get far more screen real estate back just by taking advantage of how Skylight is designed.

Example: 

Here's my full layout:

Versus my compact layout for a single, low res panel:

I'm saving FAR more space folding away the panels I don't use than I would do by hiding a few menu and scroll bars,

 

Edited December 19, 2021 by Lord Tim