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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Ubuntu 14.04 Gets Locally Integrated Menus (LIM)

Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr: After getting new GTK3 CSS themed window decorations and other interesting changes this week, Unity has received yet another new feature: locally integrated menus, or LIM.

Locally integrated menus are displayed in the window decorations for unmaximized windows, instead of the default Unity approach which is to display the menu on the top panel. There is one thing that the default Unity menu and LIM have in common: both are displayed on mouse over and there's no option to make the menu permanently visible, at least not yet.

As for maximized windows, the menu continues to be displayed on the top panel when using LIM.

This type of menu was first announced at the beginning of 2012 and was supposed to be added to Ubuntu 12.04 but it was subsequently delayed until now, when this feature finally landed in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, though it's a bit different: instead of a menu button, the menus are displayed directly in the titlebar.

LIM is is not enabled by default in Ubuntu 14.04 for now, but it can easily be enabled via System Settings > Appearance, on the Behavior tab:

However, according to Marco Trevisan (the developer behind this feature), LIM might become default for Ubuntu 14.04, depending on community feedback:

"As this is an LTS release, before setting this menu mode as the default we wanted to have some community feedback."

Some LIM-related settings such as the click movement threshold or the double click wait are not available in System Settings but can be found in Dconf-editor, under com > canonical > unity > integrated-menus.

Besides LIM, another important set of changes landed in Unity, for HiDPI support. Since I can't test this (I don't have a HiDPI monitor), I'm not sure how well HiDPI is currently supported in Unity and if more changes are required for a proper HighDPI experience.

This update should be available to all Ubuntu 14.04 users in a few minutes.

Locally Integrated Menus (LIM) Set As Default In Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet

Update: With just 3 days before the Ubuntu 15.04 release, Unity was updated with only one change: the default out of the box menu was set back to global menu.

After getting an option to always show the menus as well as global menu (Appmenu) support for Java Swing applications, yet another menu-related change has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet: locally integrated menu (LIM) is now the default menu.

Locally integrated menus are displayed in the window's titlebar for unmaximized windows, instead of the previous default Unity approach, which was to always display the menu on the top panel. LIM was introduced with Ubuntu 14.04 as an alternative to Unity's Appmenu (global menu), but it's not used by default in either Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10.

Even though the Unity changelog doesn't mention this change, LIM being set as default in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is confirmed by Marco Marco Trevisan's "lim-everywhere" Unity branch that was merged into Unity yesterday (check out the merge request description HERE). This update has already landed in Vivid so if you install the latest Unity update, LIM should be used by default.

To accompany this change, Marco has tweaked locally integrated menus (which use autohide by default) to allow accessing the menus of unfocused windows as well, a feature that wasn't available until now:

Thanks to this tweak, you can directly open the menu of an unfocused window by clicking on it. If you don't like this behavior, you can disable it via Dconf Editor: com > canonical > unity > integrated-menus > unfocused-windows-popup.

For now, LIM continues to use autohide and there's no option in the System Settings to enable the recently introduced "always show menus" option so if you want to enable that option, you'll have to use Dconf Editor (com > canonical > unity and enable "always-show-menus").

If you prefer the old default global menu (Appmenu), you can easily switch back to it, by going to System Settings > Appearance and on the Behavior tab, under "Show the menus for a window", enable "In the menu bar".

Use A Global Menu In Xubuntu Or Linux Mint Xfce Via A New TopMenu Plugin [PPA]

Remember TopMenu? It's a standalone global menu which until recently only shipped with a MATE panel applet. Well, the TopMenu developer has added a new plugin, which allows using TopMenu under Xfce (Xfce Panel).

By default, TopMenu fully supports GTK2 applications and, according to its homepage, GTK3 is partially supported, though I'm not sure what "partially" means because I didn't encounter any issues. Furthermore, there are additional plugins for Qt4 and Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird and Zotero) applications.

Unfortunately TopMenu doesn't come with multi-monitor support (only one applet can be used, so if you have two monitors with two panels at the top, you can only place TopMenu on one of them), doesn't support transparency and most importantly, it doesn't play very nicely with many Xfce themes - in my test, the Xfce Panel applet uses the wrong background color with almost all the themes I've tried so keep this in mind if you want to give it a try.

The only theme that looks ok with TopMenu from the themes I had on my system (well, I only have a few themes installed but anyway) is Numix, which you can see in the screenshot below:

The default Linux Mint 17.1 (Xfce edition) theme also looks ok:

With Greybird however, TopMenu isn't exactly pretty:

I'm guessing that this can be fixed from the GTK theme but I have no experience with that so I can't help you with this issue (note that except in the GTK3 case, the menu is always rendered using the GTK2 theme).

As usual, to make it easy to install in Xubuntu 14.04 / 14.10 / 15.04 and Linux Mint 17 / 17.1, I've uploaded the new TopMenu Xfce plugin to a PPA. I should also mention that all the TopMenu packages are now available for Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (so Ubuntu MATE 15.04 users can now install it from our PPA) and also, the TopMenu Mozilla extension is now available in the PPA so you no longer have to install the external .xpi file that I built.

Note that TopMenu is not considered stable, so you may encounter bugs! Use it at your own risk!

Install and configure TopMenu in Xubuntu 14.04, 14.10 or 15.04 / Linux Mint 17 or 17.1

1. Install TopMenu

To add our PPA and install TopMenu in Xubuntu 14.04, 14.10 or 15.04 / Linux Mint 17 or 17.1 and derivatives, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:failsdownloadsteam/mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xfce4-topmenu-plugin

Installing "xfce4-topmenu-plugin" should install all the extra plugins which bring support for GTK3, Qt and Mozilla, which are added them as "recommended" packages (so you're not forced to install all of them). In case some of those plugins are not installed automatically (like in Linux Mint, which doesn't install recommended packages by default), you can use the command below to install them:

sudo apt-get install libtopmenu-gtk3 libtopmenu-qt topmenu-mozilla-extension

Arch Linux users can install TopMenu for Xfce via AUR.

For other Linux distributions, see the instructions @ TopMenu homepage.

2. After installing TopMenu, log out and log back in (this is required to load the TopMenu modules).

3. Add TopMenu to the Xfce Panel

To add TopMenu to the Xfce Panel, right click the panel, select Panel > Panel Preferences (we're using this instead of directly selecting "Add New Items..." so we can choose where the menu will show up) and on the Items tab, click "+" and add "TopMenu":

Next, drag TopMenu to the position you want it to be displayed on the panel:

... and that's it!

For how to install and use TopMenu as a global menu in MATE (Ubuntu MATE and Linux Mint MATE), see THIS article.

Global Menu Applet For Cinnamon Desktop: `Global Application Menu`

A much requested applet was released to the Cinnamon Applets website recently: Global Application Menu.

Global Application Menu is a Cinnamon (the desktop environment used by default in Linux Mint Cinnamon edition) applet which allows displaying the application menu on the Cinnamon panel, either as a horizontal menu or as a menu button:

The applet, developed by Lester Carballo Pérez (lestcape) is based on the GNOME Shell AppIndicator extension and it makes use of unity-gtk-module (so it requires unity-gtk2-module and unity-gtk3-module to be installed). Thanks to this, the new Cinnamon global menu works with GTK2, GTK3 and Qt applications (requires appmenu-qt) as well as LibreOffice.

From the Global Application Menu settings, you can change the way the menu looks an behaves: you can show or hide the application icon on the panel, desaturate the app icon, show or hide the app name, display the menu as an horizontal menu or as a menu button and more:

Important. Please read.

According to its description, the applet is currently in beta and there are some potential/known issues. For instance, the applet can completely freeze Cinnamon in some cases and the Firefox menu disappears after some time. Also, in my test, the GNOME Terminal menu didn't work, even though I enabled "Show menubar" from its context menu.

I tested Global Application Menu with Linux Mint 17.1 and Ubuntu 15.04 with Cinnamon installed from the official Ubuntu repositories and while everything worked great under Linux Mint 17.1, Cinnamon failed to load under Ubuntu 15.04 after installing the Unity GTK modules and adding Global Application Menu applet to the panel (this might be caused by something I had installed or it might be related to the incomplete Cinnamon available in the official Ubuntu 15.04 repositories).

To recover from this issue, I removed the applet from ~/.local/share/cinnamon/applets/ and followed the uninstall instructions from HERE. So use this at your own risk and only if you know how to fix everything in case things go wrong!

The global menu did work in my test under Ubuntu 14.04 using the latest stable Cinnamon version from the lestcape PPA. So to use it in Ubuntu, I recommend using that PPA (the PPA only supports Ubuntu 14.04).

Install Global Application Menu Cinnamon Applet in Linux Mint or Ubuntu (14.04)

The Global Application Menu might not work with the Cinnamon versions available in the official repositories so to use this in Ubuntu, I recommend using letscape PPA (Ubuntu 14.04 only). Also, please read the notes above before installing Global Application Menu applet!

1. Install Unity/Qt appmenu modules.

To be able to use the Cinnamon Global Application Menu applet, you'll firstly need to install the Unity (AppMenu) GTK and Qt modules:

sudo apt-get install unity-gtk2-module unity-gtk3-module appmenu-qt appmenu-qt5

2. Restart your computer.

The Unity GTK/Qt modules load at system boot so to load them, a system restart is required.

3. Install Global Menu applet via Cinnamon Settings.

To do this, open Cinnamon's System Settings and go to Applets > Available applets (online), then search for "Global Application Menu", select it and click "Install or update selected items":

4. Add the Global Application Menu to the panel.

To do this, right click on the panel on which you want to add the applet (preferably set up either a single top panel or two panels, one at the top and one at the bottom, so you can add the global menu to the top panel), select "Add applets to the panel" and from the "Installed applets" tab, select "Global Application Menu" and click "Add to panel".

5. Log out, log back in and you should now see a Global Application Menu on the Cinnamon panel, like in the screenshots above.

To configure it, right click the applet on the panel and select "Configure".

For how to completely uninstall Global Application Menu Cinnamon applet, see the instructions from HERE.

Report any bugs you may find @ GitHub.

Thanks to Iain Closs for the tip!

Get A Global Menu In MATE 1.8 With TopMenu (PPA For Ubuntu And Linux Mint)

One of the most requested MATE features is the addition of a global menu applet. However, such an applet (called TopMenu) already exists, though it's not available in any PPA and that prevents many Ubuntu / Linux Mint users from installing it.

To make it easier to install, I've packed TopMenu in a PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 (requires using Ubuntu MATE or upgrading to MATE 1.8 via PPA) and 14.10 as well as Linux Mint 17 and 17.1 (MATE edition, obviously).

TopMenu is compatible with MATE 1.8 (a MATE 1.8 panel applet is shipped) and it fully supports GTK2. According to its homepage, GTK3 is partially supported (I didn't encounter any functionality issues in my test) and there are additional plugins for Qt4 and Mozilla apps (Firefox and Thunderbird). I should also mention that unlike Unity's AppMenu, TopMenu doesn't autohide and it's always visible when an application is focused.

Here are a few TopMenu screenshots taken under Ubuntu MATE:

TopMenu - GTK2 app

TopMenu - GTK3 app

TopMenu - Qt app

TopMenu Firefox extension

For technical information about TopMenu, see its homepage.

Important notes (please read!):

TopMenu is not considered stable and according to its homepage, GTK3 is only partially supported, so you may encounter bugs or it may not work at all for you;
I had to tweak TopMenu GTK3 to render properly (some colors were hard-coded and it didn't respect the panel colors) but it's still not perfect and some stuff won't look properly - for instance, when using a transparent panel;
if you want to remove TopMenu installed from our PPA, use "purge" instead of remove (this should completely remove it: "sudo apt-get purge libtopmenu-*") - that's required to remove the script the package adds under /etc/profile.d/;
the PPA provides the latest TopMenu from Git;
TopMenu from our PPA only works with MATE 1.8. To be able to use it in Ubuntu 14.04 (if you don't use Ubuntu MATE 14.04), you'll have to install the latest MATE via PPA.

How to get a global menu under MATE 1.8 with TopMenu in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

1. Install TopMenu

Firstly, let's install TopMenu. To add our PPA and install TopMenu for MATE 1.8 in Ubuntu 14.04 (if you don't use Ubuntu MATE 14.04, you'll have to install MATE 1.8 via PPA), 14.10 or 15.05 / Linux Mint (MATE edition) 17 or 17.1, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:failsdownloadsteam/mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-topmenu-applet

Installing "mate-topmenu-applet" should install all the extra plugins which bring support for GTK3, Qt and Mozilla, which are added them as "recommended" packages (so you're not forced to install all of them). In case some of those plugins are not installed automatically (like in Linux Mint, which doesn't install recommended packages by default), you can use the command below to install them:

sudo apt-get install libtopmenu-gtk3 libtopmenu-qt topmenu-mozilla-extension

Arch Linux users can install TopMenu via AUR: for GTK2 | GTK3 | Qt (you must load it manually as explained on the TopMenu homepage).

Other Linux distributions: see the instructions @ TopMenu homepage.

2. Once TopMenu has been installed, log out and log back in - this is required to load the TopMenu modules.

3. Adding the TopMenu applet to the MATE 1.8 panel.

Before adding the TopMenu applet to the MATE panel, it's important to mention that the default MATE "Menu Bar" will stop working so instead of this applet, you'll have to use either the "Main Menu" applet or the "MATE Menu" applet. If you have the Menu Bar applet added to the panel, remove it before proceeding!

To add TopMenu to the MATE panel, right click the panel in an empty area and select "Add to panel" and add "TopMenu Panel Applet":

Then, open some application that has a menu (try it with a GTK2 app firstly, like Caja), move the menu to the position you want it to be displayed, right click it and select "Lock to panel". If you don't do this, the TopMenu applet position will reset after a logout.

Update: if you use Xfce, see: Use A Global Menu In Xubuntu Or Linux Mint Xfce Via A New TopMenu Plugin [PPA]

Always Show Menus Unity Feature Lands In Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet

The option to always show the Unity menus, implemented by +Marco Trevisan, has landed in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.

As you probably know, in the current stable Ubuntu releases (12.04, 14.04 and 14.10), the Unity (global) menus are displayed on mouseover for both the default menu that's displayed on the top Unity panel and LIM (locally integrated menu), which is displayed in the application titlebar.

With Ubuntu 15.04, there's a new option (not enabled by default) which allows setting the Unity menus to always be visible:

Unity always-show-menus Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet

This option can be changed (at least for now, this is the only way) via Dconf-Editor, by going to com > canonical > unity and enabling "always show menus".

Right now, you need to restart Unity after changing the menu behavior (to restart Unity, press ALT + F2 and enter "unity" or log out and log back in) but I think this is a bug (I reported it here) because I don't remember this being required when I first tested the "always show menus" feature about 3-4 weeks ago (it was in a separate branch and not available by default in Ubuntu 15.04 back then), especially since right now, in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, you must also restart Unity if you want to switch to LIM, which is not the case in Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10. But Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet is still in alpha so bugs are to be expected.

Below you can watch a quick video I've recorded under Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet (VirtualBox), demonstrating the new "always show menus" Unity feature:

(direct video link; for more videos, subscribe to our YouTube channel)
Besides this feature, the latest Unity update in Vivid also brings a fix for using Dash and HUD on top of full-screen applications (as an example, until now, you couldn't open HUD or bring up the Dash when using Firefox in full-screen).

If you're using Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, make sure you update to Unity version "7.3.1+15.04.20150115-0ubuntu1" to be able to use this new feature. Note that if you're not using the main repositories mirror, it may take a while until the new version is available for you.

In other Unity menus-related news, JAyatana is now installed by default in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet, meaning that the next Ubuntu release will ship with Java Swing appmenu (global menu) support by default.

Get Unity Global Menu / HUD Support For Java Swing Applications With JAyatana

Java Swing Ayatana is a project that brings Ubuntu global menu (AppMenu) and HUD support for Java Swing applications.

JAyatana version 2 was released recently, getting support for Ubuntu 13.10 along with a PPA for easy installation. Update: the PPA now supports Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10.

Using this, you'll get Unity AppMenu and HUD support for applications such as: NetBeans IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, jDownloader and so on.

~~The current version has a small display bug with IntelliJ Idea and Android Studio~~ - the bug was fixed minutes after publishing this post, thanks to danjaredg for the quick fix!

Here's an IntelliJ IDEA screenshot using a global menu under Unity (Ubuntu 14.04):

And Netbeans IDE:

And of course, HUD works too:

Note that this won't work for Eclipse because it's a SWT application (update: in Ubuntu 14.04, Eclipse has HUD / AppMenu support by default). If you want Unity AppMenu / HUD support for Eclipse IDE, see the instructions HERE for Ubuntu 13.04 and older or, for Ubuntu 14.04, use the new unity-gtk-module dconf option to whitelist Eclipse. Unfortunately the old method to enable the Eclipse AppMenu doesn't work properly in Ubuntu 13.10.

Get global menu / HUD support for Java Swing applications using Java Ayatana

Java Swing Ayatana is available in a PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10. Add the PPA and install it using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danjaredg/jayatana
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jayatana

Once installed, log out and log back in.

If you want to checkout the source, report bugs and so on, see the Java Swing Ayatana page @ Google Code.

How to rever the changes

1. Because files in /etc/ are only removed when the package that installs them is purged, to revert the changes you'll have to purge the packages installed from the PPA using the following command:

sudo apt-get --purge remove jayatana libjayatana libjayatanaag libjayatana-java libjayatanaag-java

2. And finally, log out and log back in.

seen @ +Bademus l.

Ubuntu 15.04 To Get Global Menu And HUD Support By Default For Java Swing Applications

Quick Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet update: JAyatana was uploaded to the main Ubuntu 15.04 repositories today (moved from proposed to release) and according to the changelog, it will probably be installed by default:

Drop dependency on java, so that we can integrate this package by default without dragging java on the default installed (as we did in the past with qt appmenu integration).

Update: JAyatana is now installed by default in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet.

Java Swing Ayatana (JAyatana) is a project that integrates Java Swing applications with Ubuntu's global menu (AppMenu) and HUD.

Using it, you get Unity AppMenu and HUD support for applications such as NetBeans IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, jDownloader and so on.

Here are a couple of screenshots of a Java Swing app (Android Studio) with global menu / HUD, under Unity:

If you want to try JAyatana in Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet right now, install it from the repositories (note that the package was just promoted to release so it might take a while until it's synchronized with the repositories mirror you're using):

sudo apt-get install jayatana

Then log out and log back in.

Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 users can install Jayatana by using its official PPA.

JAyatana is a project that integrates Java Swing applications (such as NetBeans IDE, IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, jDownloader and so on) with Ubuntu's global menu and HUD.

Starting with Ubuntu 15.04, JAyatana was installed by default and it was configured to allow all Java Swing applications to use Ubuntu's global menu and HUD. This was changed yesterday when JAyatana was updated to no longer export the JAVA_TOOL_OPTION session file, meaning that Ubuntu no longer supports HUD or global menu for Java Swing applications by default.

This change affects both Ubuntu 15.10 and 15.04 (though for Ubuntu 15.04, this update is still in the proposed repository).

The reason behind the change is that by enabling JAyatana globally, each time you run a Java application, this would be displayed in the output:

Picked up JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS: -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar

And this breaks some programs that are running "java -version" and grep the output.

If this doesn't affect the applications you're using, you can re-enable JAyatana globally, by creating a file called "jayatana.conf" under /usr/share/upstart/sessions/ and paste this in the file:

description "Java Ayatana"

start on starting dbus

script
 initctl set-env --global JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar $JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS"
end script

Then save the file, restart the session and Unity's global menu and HUD should work again for Java Swing applications.

You can also enable it on a per-program basis, by adding the following line in the program start script, etc.:

JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-javaagent:/usr/share/java/jayatanaag.jar $JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS"

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