First, this is not a duplicate of How can I always show the close, minimise & maximise buttons into their own windows? - I would like to preserve global menus.
Is there a way to only always show the close, minimise and maximise buttons on every application?
The use case is as follows: I have a maximized application in the background, over it is a not-maximized application that has got focus. I want to close the maximized application. I move the pointer to upper left corner. The buttons do not show, since the background application does not have focus. I have to go back, click on it and then go back to the corner to close it. I do that several times a day :-( .
Turns out this bothers many people and there were six separate bugs already filled in launchpad, this is the master bug
I tried to solve same problem for myself and found following unacceptable workaround, which I'm posting for informative purposes, not as a real solution:
In
Control Center > Windowsdialog, tick on "Select windows when mouse moves over them" and leave empty box for "Raise selected window...".What it does it focuses window you hover with mouse without raising it and makes this problem easily solvable, but also introduces other problem: For application that aren't maximised (or touching top of Unity panel) only way to access it menu is through keyboard shortcut: F10
Then I thought if it's possible to trigger this "focus on hover without raising" feature only if special keyboard shortcut is pressed, but been unable to find how
You could try this, if it doesn't work out as intended or there are some undesirable results just remove the line.
As I mentioned before do not do this with a transparent panel, (unless you're disabling "Have file manager handle the desktop"
Put this on a new line at bottom of file, save & log out/in
Not really that keen on this method but should work for all but browsers & email in unity