Provide the ability to turn off the automatic display of the start center. Right now it comes up whenever no document is selected. With that change, the Tools and Help menu should always be present, even if no document is being displayed. (If the automatic display has been turned off, of course the user can always invoke the start center from the File menu item.) Rather than new preferences, I suppose the same functionality could be provided in the start center window itself, but I think I'd prefer it be as a preference, presumably in the LibreOffice/Preferences/LibreOffice/View window. Obviously it's a personal preference (that's why they're called that, right?) but most of the time I find the start center an annoyance rather than a help. I know other apps I've used have similar functionality, but I don't like it in them either! As best I can tell, the only functionality you lose by turning off the start center is to be able to delete individual items from the recents list. (I'm assuming this applies to all OS's and hardware.)
When the start center would be disabled, what would be in the empty rectangle under the menu?
What empty rectangle? I'm on a Mac. It's been a long time since I've been on a Windows machine, so I'd forgotten you can't have a menu without a window! And it's been even longer since I used a unix machine, and I don't remember what windowing system I used on it, so I don't know how your question applies to that environment.
Created attachment 140075 [details] picture of screen without start center Here's a picture of how the top left portion of the screen would look without the start center. (I've added a big red L to my icon for the LibreOffice app.) Just for illustrative purposes, I've shown it with the File menu opened. I think this answers the comment about "the rectangle". There ain't one! Note that the dock is on the left.
Confirming on Version: 6.0.1.1 Build ID: 60bfb1526849283ce2491346ed2aa51c465abfe6 Threads CPU : 4; OS : Mac OS X 10.13.3; UI Render : par défaut; Locale : fr-FR (fr_FR.UTF-8); Calc: group There is currently no option in the Advanced Configuration Settings under StartCenter to turn it off on OSX. The problem is that in order to function, LO requires that a window be drawn to provide a main menu (by default at the top of the screen) - on OSX, the effects of this are only visible when moving in/out of fullscreen mode, e.g. when closing a document window (cf. all of the already known bugs related to incoherent fullscreen support on OSX).
(In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #1) > When the start center would be disabled, what would be in the empty > rectangle under the menu? @Mike : as opposed to what one sees on Linux when all document windows are closed, there is no visible (at least visible to the user) grey background window on OSX.
Other than I find the start window somewhat annoying (childish?) I realized one reason it is especially annoying. I like to have LibreOffice (previously, NeoOffice) set to open on log-in since it does take a fair amount of time to start up. It is especially annoying to have the start window show up under those circumstances. In any case, most of the time I open a document for editing by clicking on it, not by picking it from the recents document list. Although I know it's bad form to refer to your "competition", but NeoOffice doesn't seem to have any problem omitting the start screen. Hmmmm. I have an idea that might accomplish 90% of what I want. There is a bit somewhere in an app's prop list that can be set to tell the system to open it hidden or invisible (I forget what term is used). If I can remember/find what that is I'll give it a try and report back. If the app were scriptable, which I don't believe it is, one could of course write a script to tell it to close that window once it's started up!