kallasoft

Caught the introduction of this story over on OS News — apparently folks have been voting on the addition of a global, application-context sensitive menubar in Gnome for a while. The design of the bar is very similar to the way the global bar in Mac works. For those that don’t know, there is a universal menubar across the top of any Mac OS X desktop:

the contents of the menubar changes depending on the application that is currently focused. This is different (and sometimes strange) for Windows users that expect to see the application’s menubar inside the application itself (File, Edit, View, etc. menus).

The Linux/Unix desktop environment, GNOME, has always behaved similarly to a Windows desktop, with the applications managing their own menubars. However, given GNOME’s drive to be a simple/intuitive desktop (and the default for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution), there has always been a very Mac-esque feel to the advancements that GNOME has taken with UI development… almost a hybrid between what Windows would do and what Mac would do. Because of this line that GNOME tended to walk, the desire to have a Mac-esque universal menubar isn’t too far of a stretch for the imagination.

[smartads]

Having this battle fought back in 2006 on Bugzilla resulting in some buggy and initial attempts at a global menubar, the effort never really got the steam it needed to be a viable solution for folks (or make it into GNOME proper). Fast-forward to today, and enter the very intuitive and flexible solution: gnome2-globalmenu project

As you can see from the screenshot above, globalmenu is a GNOME applet, requiring no hacked GTK builds or special GNOME builds — simply follow the dead-easy Ubuntu install instructions (or generic install instructions). For the Ubuntu folks, you’ll want to register the following repository depending on the Ubuntu version you are on:

• Ubuntu 9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope:
  • deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
  • deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
• Ubuntu 8.10 – Intrepid Ibex:
  • deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
  • deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
• Ubuntu 8.04 – Hardy Heron (LTS):
  • deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
  • deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/globalmenu-team/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

NOTE: When registering the repository, be sure to check the Add Source box as well, that will automatically add the deb-src entries above to your sources list.

Next, on the Authentication Tab, you can import the gnome2-globalmenu GPG repository key to authenticate the software against, and then hit Reload and you are all set. When you are done the applet installed and listed in the GNOME Add to Panel dialog:

and away you go!

Configuring globalmenu is straight forward, with some basic preferences you can choose:

and usage is automatic… when you fire up an application, it’s menu-bar does not exist in the application’s window, but is instead promoted to the top of the screen to the global menubar:

Right now only GTK-based applications are supported, so for applications like Firefox and OpenOffice, the menubars will still exist inside the application’s main menu, but this is an excellent start to the work.

Let’s hope this rolled into a future GNOME release and built on!