IceArdor's Blog

Sometimes I want to watch a YouTube video full screen while checking my email on my dual-screen monitor (once you go dual, you'll be a slave to productivity). The problem is that if you click the fullscreen icon on YouTube and you click your mailbox, YouTube will unfullscreen itself. This is likely the same case for other online video services. Next I tried using Opera's zoom feature (hit the + key to zoom in, hit 6 to zoom back to 100% if you have single-key shortcuts enabled or repeatedly press - until you're zoomed out), but realized that the address bar, tab bar, status bar, and menu bar all decreased the maximum pseudo-fullscreen mode. I learned how to quickly show/hide these menu items from Tamil's blog. Even if you don't have dual monitors, this is still useful to make a minimalistic container for viewing any web content (the idea behind Google Chrome's minimalistic design). There's several options: 1. Add to your right-click menu 1. Open your menu.ini configuration file (either located here or C:\Program Files\Opera\ui\standard_menu.ini) 2. Find the section labeled [Document Popup Menu] 3. At the end of that section, just below the line that reads

Item, MI_IDM_FULLSCREENTOGGLE			= Enter fullscreen | Leave fullscreen

add the following line:

Item, "Semi-Full Screen"			= Enable menu bar & View page bar, 6 & View address bar, 6 & View status bar, 6 | Disable menu bar & View page bar, 0 & View address bar, 0 & View status bar, 0

2. Add as a keyboard shortcut 1. Go to Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Shortcuts 2. Under the Keyboard Shortcuts section, click the "Edit..." button 3. In the Edit Keyboard Setup tree, expand the "Applications (default)" item. 4. Click the "New..." button 5. Under the "Input context and shortcuts" column under the newly created blank entry, type "F11 alt". 6. Under the "Actions column", type

Enable menu bar & View page bar, 6 & View address bar, 6 & View status bar, 6 | Disable menu bar & View page bar, 0 & View address bar, 0 & View status bar, 0

USAGE: Hit Alt+F11 to hide the menu, page, address, and status bars. Hit Alt+F11 again to show all the toolbars. You can change the items that are shown and hidden in this shortcut by changing the Actions column. Tamil's blog entry on Auto-hide toolbars in Opera shows you the names of the toolbars and the codes to use. As you can guess, the action code takes the form of x & y & z | x & y & z, where | denotes an additional state and x, y, and z are complete commands. 3. Add a button to your toolbar 1. Click this button: FS. (warning: if you put this button on your toolbar and that toolbar gets hidden, you'll have to go through Opera Appearances to show the hidden toolbars. If this doesn't work, try copy-pasting the following code into your address bar. You must be using Opera in order for the shortcut to be made:

opera:/button/Enable%20menu%20bar,,,%22FS%22%20&%20View%20page%20bar,%206%20&%20View%20address%20bar,%206%20&%20View%20status%20bar,%206%20%7C%20Disable%20menu%20bar,,,%22FS%22%20&%20View%20page%20bar,%200%20&%20View%20address%20bar,%200%20&%20View%20status%20bar,%200

ConclusionAt the end of all of this, you should be gaining around 110 pixels of vertical space. If you want to watch a movie that's 400 pixels high, this much space savings means a lot. Here's the before and after pictures:

Before	After