With the addition of the Ubuntu Unity interface has come the global menu or AppMenu. This is the Mac-like menubar that appears at the top of the screen, on the panel, as opposed to on each window, as in Windows or other Linux releases.
There are a couple advantages to having the global menu in place. First is that it saves vertical space on your monitor. If each window has its own menu the way it's traditionally been done, then that increases the size of each window by the height of the menubar. Having a global menu in the panel doesn't add to the panel's size, so now each window can hold that much more content. Also, having the menu at the top of the screen creates a fixed target for the cursor to hit, making the menu easier to find.
The problem many of us see with the global menu is that it can't be configured. As we discussed in a previous article, the new settings application for Unity called Unsettings offers a feature to turn off the global menu. The setting can be found in the Windows tab. Below you'll see the setting for the Global Menu turned on.
Once you've moved the Global Menu slider to the Off position, click the gears menu in the toolbar, then log off and back in to complete the process. Your windows will now have their own menus, just as they did before the Global Menu.
Or at least, most of them have their own menus. Changing this setting, unfortunately, doesn't completely remove the global menus from all applications. Firefox and Thunderbird, in particular, will still have their global menus turned on. This is because they aren't standard GTK or Qt applications, and so have needed special libraries to even use the global menus in the first place.
So, what to do?
There are a couple options, although both involve removing libraries from your system, instead of simply turning the feature on or off as would be ideal.
If you've already used Unsettings to turn off the feature for all programs but Firefox and Thunderbird, you can always remove the packages those two programs use to create their global menus. Typing sudo apt-get remove firefox-globalmenu thunderbird-globalmenu will do that.
If you want to remove Global Menus completely from your system, typing sudo apt-get remove indicator-appmenu will do the trick.
You may also want to type sudo apt-get remove appmenu-qt appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 in order to delete those packages.
If you don't remove those three libraries, you may run into the odd situation where a window will pop into place without the standard menus, only for them to appear a second later. It doesn't cause any harm, but the situation happens because the libraries we removed in the last step are telling the application to hide the menubar, only to need it to be shown once it is "realized" that the indicator-appmenu package is not running. Eventually, however, you'll end up with a window with the menubar placed where it always was, just under the title bar.
So there you have it. At the moment, the whole situation is kind of a mess. The feature can be turned on like normal or turned off entirely, but not really anything in between. It would be very nice if there was a built-in setting for more tweaking, but at the moment at least, this doesn't exist. But at least for now, you'll be able to remove the feature from your system, should you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment