Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars. How about we take this concept a step further?
This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the title bar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don’t export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with
↫ material-decoration’s GitHub pageGDK_BACKEND=x11environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only).
So this little tool allows you to add an application’s menu bar (file, edit, view, etc.) to the titlebar of a KDE application. The way it works is that it adds an optional widget to KDE’s System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons…, alongside regular staples like close, minimise, maximise, etc. You can then freely add said “menu bar” to the title bar of your applications. There’s some configuration options, too. For instance, you can disable the search button, or turn the entire menu bar into a hamburger menu instead.
It looks weird, and I’m definitely not the target audience for this, but I do find it intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I doubt many people will like it since it takes up so much space if you don’t opt to use the hamburger menu option. That being said, I’m fairly sure KDE and Kwin allow you to edit the titlebars of specific applications and specific windows, which does open some interesting possibilities for, say, applications or windows which you always have maximised or whatever.
There’s an AUR package for Arch users, but everyone else will have to build it themselves.
While I hate client-side window decorations, I like the idea of a menu command search, which MacOS has had for years. I wish there was a way to just add that feature to KDE menus.
There is a way to do that – add a global menu bar widget to a panel. The last item in the bar is ‘Search’ with a text box to search through all the other menu commands a la MacOS or Unity HUD.
edit – oops, sorry this was a reply to the comment by Angel Blue01 (haven’t posted for a long time…)
The AUR package isn’t a binary based package, so technically Arch Linux users also have to build it themselves.
I wonder if there will ever come a day, when KDE is not terminally ugly.
That day was there and went away again … around KDE 2
This looks a lot like the locally-integrated menubars that were (briefly) an option in Unity. There — as here — it was a way to have searchable-command menus that also didn’t claim too much screen real estate.
If I remember right, LIM’s were an option in Unity to accommodate large screens better (i.e. with less long-distance cursor movement) than a global menu would.