Global Menu is one of the most interesting features of Kde Plasma 5.9, the latest major release of the Kde Desktop Environment.
Global Menus allow the user to have the application menu into the application itself, as a titlebar button or into a widget panel placed at the top of the screen.
Global Menu is a very exciting feature a user would like to try, but unfortunately, for some reasons, enabling it may be a bit complicated if you don’t know where to search.
In this tutorial we will see how to enable the Titlebar Button and the Application Widget menu as well.
Titlebar Button
The Titlebar Button is a little icon placed into the Titlebar that allows the user to access the application menu by clicking on it. In order to enable it, open the System Settings and go into the Application Style option. In the Widget Style setting, go to Fine Tuning tab and select the Title bar button as a Menubar style entry.
After doing this, you have to place the Title button manually in order to use it, since will be no automatic option to make it visible.
To do this, go to the Windows Decoration option of the Application Style dialog. Go to the Buttons tab and drag the little Application Menu icon into the Titlebar.
Now you can use the Title button widget on any application having an application menu.
Application Menu Widget
To enable the Application Menu Widget select the relative entry in the Menu Style option of the Fine Tuning tab.
Go to Desktop, right click on it and select Add Panel -> Application Menu Bar.
As you can see, enabling the Global Menu may be a bit complicated if you don’t know where to search. Anyway, although I am extremely grateful to the Kde team for the fantastic job they have done with this new major release of Plasma, I hope they will improve the desktop usability making this new interesting feature easier to enable for those who don’t want to spend their time in searching for tutorials like this on the internet. 😉
On the part about enabling the Application Menu Widget, it says “go to Desktop”. No idea what that means.
Hi,
Open the System Settings and go into the Application Style option. Select the Widget Style setting, go to Fine Tuning tab and select Application Menu Widget as Menubar style entry .
Now ,the blank panel on top of the screen should show the application menu when you use an application that have such a type of menu.
In order to test it, try to run Konsole or Kwrite.
Already did that. Still no application menu in Konsole or Kwrite.
Unsure if you figured this out already, “Desktop” is reffering to the part of the screen with the wallpaper, alternatively, there’s a widget called global menu, if you’d like to style your DE as macOS or whatever 😀
I figured out what go to desktop means but when I clicked on Application Menu Bar, I got a new panel at the top of my screen just like the one on the bottom that pops up so I can add widgets or change settings. And after following the steps above I still don’t have a title button on my titlebar. I’m using openSUSE Tumbleweed with plasma 5.9.
I opted for the Titlebar Button. It wasn’t possible to drag the Application Menu icon to the titlebar. No worries, logging out & back in shows the icon in the titlebar.
This is awesome! No more wasted space on my screen with that menu!
It would be very nice if the Global Menu activation nodes were following the mouse. It is unfortunatelly almost unusable in the current state.
Yes, I noticed this problem too. I hope it will be fixed soon.
Does not work with thunderbird/firefox on kUbuntu 17.04.
This damned scrap piece crashing Smplayer when is active – plasma 5.8.7 – Open Suse leap 42.3.