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incredion wrote:Does QT4 support it or is a lack of support there the reason why it is not still there?

If you read the links given by Hans above, you'll find that ther are some (minor?) techical issues. But I think the main reason for not reintroducing the Mac style menu bar is: Nobody of the developers seems to see this as a priority.

I guess until someone with some time and expeirience in C++/KDE development stands up and works on it we have to live with the missing Mac OS menu bar. I've given up asking for it, being told every time that it would come with the next release.

I don't think that plasma performance would be a problem, but I'm no expert. The irony about it is that plasmas design goal were IIRC to reimplempent KDE 3's features in a cleaner and more flexible way ... and now Gnome seem to have a better approach to implement a Mac style menu bar.

:(

For me it would be useful to place the menubar together with a clock or RSS or something like that.
Plasma is good!

the developer who was working on the menu bar stopped, after saying for a couple of releases "it should be done for the next release". disappointing? certainly. would it be nice to have this feature? yes. is it a critical feature? no. that's simply the reality of things.

and personally, i am kept busy with other things.

"The irony about it is that plasmas design goal were IIRC to reimplempent KDE 3's features in a cleaner and more flexible way"

finding a way to make a better mac menu bar wasn't a design goal. it's possible to do with plasma, but nobody has done it, though some people complain about it fortnightly. and until that white knight comes riding in, i resent the implication that because we haven't implemented your pet feature that we've failed our own design goals. yeesh.

Nobody said that plasma failed on it's desing goals. I'm not a devolper and it's not up to me to judge about that, all I read it that the rework now pays off. And in fact KDE is getting better with each release.

Nobody said that finding a way to make a better mac menu bar was an explicit design goal of plasma. Correct me if I'm wrong: I would excpect that to be a natural by-product of the general design goals of plasma. Is it not?

Did someone say it's a critical feature? I thought voting here is a legitime way to express the priorties from the users point of view and discuss them without beeing dismissed as a "fortnightly complaining" user. This thread was inactive for 7 months and I've had given up asking developers for the Mac menu more than a year ago. Since this thread is active again by a new posting of "incredion" the votes doubled within a few days.

Nobody wants to force you or other developers to implement a mac menu bar, in fact I wrote: "Nobody of the developers seems to see this as a priority. I guess until someone with some time and expeirience in C++/KDE development stands up and works on it we have to live with the missing Mac OS menu bar."

Do you really think it is encouraging for a potential user among those who miss the Mac menu bar to start to work on it, if you, as plasmas project lead, refer to it as a "pet feature" requested by annoying users?

Nobody claims that you or others have "failed" on anything, we're just disappointed, as you are and miss the mac os menu bar. No need to get aggresive or sarcastic.

Nobody of the developers with Plasma/X/KWin-experience.

While I don't find the Mac style menubar particularly useful, this is certainly a good option to have, especially for users switching from MacOS.

If this feature is done for KDE4 (plasmoid or not) it should also implement this universal menubar for non-Qt applications like Firefox and the GIMP.

@Angel Blue01
Do not expect such hackish features when there's not yet any working version.

There's again some coverage of the issue of a global menu bar, this time from Ubuntus Mark Shuttleworth. He suggests the gobal menu as default for the netbook version of Ubuntu 10.10 and recommends a compatible Gnome/KDE solution via D-BUS.

See http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359 for details.

I use sometimes XBar because it is supported by QtCurve style. I liked Bespin style but it drives me away time to time. QtCurve in other hand fits for my purposes. I would use Oxygen if it would just support XBar.

There are many applications what should support Ctrl+M menu hiding. Some developers do not want to include that feature to kdelibs so it would be in every KDE application out there. Good thing is that QtCurve support experimental Ctrl+Alt+M shortcut for hiding menu. This way many applications gets better usability because the useless menu can be hided (useless, because ALL needed functions are in toolbar!), like in Kontact (Kmail etc).

It is just sad that even that function does not work correctly. Example. You can get KMail menubar hidden. You can have "New" and "Addressbook" windowses as well with hided menu. But when you open a email, it has menu shown because it is not stored to memory. So you can not hide menu totally.

Does some people need something what XBar offers? Yes.
Does some people need possibility to hide menubar? Yes.

Do we need them now? Yes.
Are they critical? No.

There is this kind work now done: http://agateau.wordpress.com/2010/05/10 ... n-windows/

This is really good news! I would really love to test it, but since the patches are for the Ubuntu Qt package and I'm on gentoo (and I need a stable system in the next days anyway), I'll better wait a bit.

I hope these patches get included soon so we'll have the global menu bar back finally for 4.6 ... and then in a Qt/GTK compatible way!