Feature request: option to show a standard menu bar on Linux

[unikitty37]

Ghostty uses a hamburger menu, but this is only accessible if gtk-titlebar is true. If gtk-titlebar is false, the menu isn't shown, and can't be opened via a keybinding as far as I can see.

I set gtk-titlebar to false because I'm using KDE, and the GTK titlebar looks extremely out of place. But without the menu, I have to memorise every keybinding — I can't go to the menu for commands I can't remember the bindings for (or see the bindings against the menu options and learn that way :)

It would be great if there was an option to replace the hamburger menu with a normal menu bar.

[mitchellh]

Do you have screenshots of what you're proposing? (i.e. from another app)

[iamgreaser]

For comparison:

• KDE konsole: File, Edit, View, Bookmarks, Plugins, Settings, Help (from the screenshot provided by unikitty37)
• xfce4-terminal: &File, &Edit, &View, &Terminal, T&abs, &Help (using "&" as a prefix for which menu item is selected when one does Alt + letter)

I'm mixed as to whether "File" is the right word to use, but I'm not about to bikeshed an alternative name for it. Plus in theory it makes localisation easier to leave it as "File".

The de-facto standard way to arrange things is &File (or equivalent), &Edit, &View, insert any extra menu items here, &Help.

(On Unix systems, &Help is traditionally right-aligned while the rest are left-aligned, but I think that is a lot less common nowadays - none of the programs I have open right now seem to special-case &Help in this manner, and while Windows does have built-in support for this arrangement, it seems to have been abandoned by the time Windows 3.1 came out.)

[tomektom]

The de-facto standard way to arrange things is &File (or equivalent), &Edit, &View, insert any extra menu items here, &Help.

That's probably more dependent of how specific DE implements this functionality. On both KDE and Hyprland I see underline eg. File, Edit - for me that's definitely more common than &

[00-kat]

In Qt you can put a & before it in your code to underline it, and use alt+<underlined key> to select that menu item with a keyboard. Not sure about other toolkits.

[iamgreaser]

On both KDE and Hyprland I see underline eg. File, Edit - for me that's definitely more common than &

Yes, it's underlined for XFCE too. It's a bit of a programmery way to denote which character is underlined. Sorry if it wasn't clear.

[pluiedev]

Not sure about other toolkits.

In GTK they're called "mnemonics"

[jcollie]

There is already a right-click context menu, although there are fewer entries in the context menu than in the normal menu.

[mitchellh]

I think we talked about this before, and not sure if it would satisfy the OP of this issue, but if the titlebar/headerbar is hidden, it would be nice to put the entire menu in the context menu under a "Menu" item.

[unikitty37]

I'd prefer a normal menubar as it can also be navigated entirely by keyboard, but adding a "Menu" item to the context menu would certainly be an improvement on the current behaviour where the menu items aren't available at all without having the GTK titlebar.

[gtxaspec]

Is there a way to reduce the title bar height? The current default is quite thick (see screenshot).

I've tried editing the following GTK theme files without success:

~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css
~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
~/.config/libadwaita-1/gtk.css

[00-kat]

Both gtk-adwaita and #3158 (comment) work, and this isn't relevant to this discussion.

[00-kat]

I remember this being discussed before, relevant links in (hopefully) chronological order: https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1303113109010907252 https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1305222734145523813 https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1303082183287640125.

I found https://discord.com/channels/1005603569187160125/1005603569711452192/1305242241962348586

Opened a discussion on GH

And also #2642. However #2642 is on the tenth of November (my time) but that Discord message was on the eleventh (my time), so I'm not sure which discussion it was.

[unikitty37]

Ah, well, I'm not on Discord as they require my mobile phone number, which they are not getting. So I wouldn't have seen that.

I think #2642 doesn't really cover the issue, as it doesn't mention most of the menu items becoming inaccessible if gtk-titlebar is false (which it would be if you're not using Gnome, as it makes the window look completely different from everything else 😁)

[jcollie]

#4952 will make the window menu and the context menus identical.

[andrejdaskalov]

So, to clear up #2642: We had a discord discussion on making a global menu available, but I ended up concluding it's no longer something you can do with GTK4. I ended up with a traditional menubar demo instead. If there is renewed interest for a traditional menubar inside the window, I could certainly do that. I'm guessing in this case, we could provide it as an optional config option?

[00-kat]

Doesn't Plasma automagically grab a traditional menu bar and make it a global menu bar if you add that widget? Or had you tried to make your own custom menu bar which looks like the one you normally find? (Sorry about the wording of this comment, I'm not sure how best to describe what I mean.)

[andrejdaskalov]

I'll have to check what I did to be precise, but it was almost certainly a standard menu in GTK. The documentation does seem to mention this:

Depending on the desktop environment, this may appear at the top of each window, or at the top of the screen.

So in theory it should do what you said, but I had no luck getting it to behave back when I was making this. I'll definitely give it another try later, to make sure it wasn't just a bug on my other system.