Unity application manager

About

The Unity application manager is an application manager for Ubuntu. Although present in earlier versions, it became unavoidable in Ubuntu 11.10.

Design Issues

disappearing menus

Unity places some application menus in the screen's top bar, somewhat like MacOS, removing them from the application's window(s); this feature is apparently referred to as the global menu.

Aside from the aesthetic issues, this also causes those applications to be essentially unusable under other desktop managers installed on the same system because the application's menu does not show up anywhere.

In the case of at least one application (Kate), the cause seems to be a configuration setting:

There's a configuration line that appears in N+1 different places, where N is however many sessions you have saved; encountering any of them causes it to get written to the others at the next opportunity.

1. ~/.kde/share/config/katerc

N. ~/.kde/share/apps/kate/sessions/*.katesession

The line looks like this (boldfaced):

[MainWindow]
Height 900=700
MenuBar=Disabled

Close Kate, delete that line in all files (katerc and the .katesession files), and reload Kate -- the menu should display.

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia

Reviews

• User:Woozle/Unity desktop manager

How-To

• 2012-07-17 How to Undo Unity
• 2011-06-04 How to Get Classic Gnome Menu in Unity
• posts by Woozle:
  • 2011-11-05 some steps I went through while figuring this out
  • 2011-10-24 after removing some libraries to try and fix it
  • 2011-10-20 Kate's menu unavailable in Gnome