I'm enjoying using kdeveloper for debugging C++ code on Ubuntu. However sometimes I would like to be able to remote the kdevelop UI to an xserver on another machine. This is a convenient way of doing remote debugging, plus one of my other machines (running Windows 7) has a much bigger monitor.

This works -- I'm currently using kdevelop in this way. However one significant problem is that none of the menus show up.

I'm running the cygwin xserver in -multiwindow mode (-rootless and full screen don't allow sizing of the kdevelop window).

Kdevelop is very dependent on its menus. Is there some trick to get them to show up? Can they be implement in some x-compatible way?

It feels like I am very close to awesomeness, but those menus are really important.

Phew, to me this sounds like a cygwin issue. Maybe ask them about it? Forwarding kdevelop to another non-cygwin X server does not have this issue as far as I know.

Maybe something is wrong with the window management, so menus are put in the wrong place, like behind the kdevelop window?

As a clunky workaround, for most things in the kdevelop menus you can configure a shortcut by right-clicking the menu item.

Greetings

Have you tried launching KDevelop using a more remote friendly style such as Plastique instead of Oxygen?

bcooksley wrote:Have you tried launching KDevelop using a more remote friendly style such as Plastique instead of Oxygen?

Hmmm. I tried that (-style plastique command line option) but it doesn't help. The main window continues to be displayed correctly but the top-level menus, which are outside of the window, are not. I wonder if it's something to do with using the Unity Desktop. I'm afraid I don't know which systems are responsible for the display of the menus, so I'm not sure what the consequences of a particular window manager or desktop might be.

So this is the complete absence of the main menu toolbar, rather than it simply being invisible?
If so, then Unity could very well be to blame (as the menu bar protocol relies on D-Bus I believe, which does not work over the network). The best way to attempt to work around this would be to not install the relevant components responsible for embedded menus on the server where KDevelop is being run.

bcooksley wrote:So this is the complete absence of the main menu toolbar, rather than it simply being invisible?
If so, then Unity could very well be to blame (as the menu bar protocol relies on D-Bus I believe, which does not work over the network). The best way to attempt to work around this would be to not install the relevant components responsible for embedded menus on the server where KDevelop is being run.

I installed gnome-shell and logged in with that and that fixes the remoting -- I now have menus. It's unfortunate that unity has made itself incompatible with remoting of any application that has menus.

bruced wrote:

bcooksley wrote:So this is the complete absence of the main menu toolbar, rather than it simply being invisible?
If so, then Unity could very well be to blame (as the menu bar protocol relies on D-Bus I believe, which does not work over the network). The best way to attempt to work around this would be to not install the relevant components responsible for embedded menus on the server where KDevelop is being run.

I installed gnome-shell and logged in with that and that fixes the remoting -- I now have menus. It's unfortunate that unity has made itself incompatible with remoting of any application that has menus.

I found a much better fix. You can set APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH to have the menus appear both at the top of the desktop and in the application window, and this is sufficient to make them appear when remoting kdevelop from Unity. Here's the command I use for launching kdevelop now:

APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH=1 DISPLAY=172.16.12.62:0.0 kdevelop&

Works like a charm, from Unity, with no change of my existing environment.

Wow, I totally misunderstood the issue. I thought you could click on the menu items but the menu subwindows wouldn't appear. Like this, yeah, it's obvious that it's unity's fault

Please note that it is also possible to experience this if you have enabled the global menubar in KDE - however I think that functionality only triggers if it is able to connect to the global menubar in question (so if you were not logged into the console on the machine you were remotely logged into, or had remotely logged in as a different user then it would not trigger).

Oh -- I think I still live in older releases where this functionality didn't exist