Kubuntu: How To Enable The KDE Appmenu [Global Menu Or Title Bar Button]

Starting with KDE SC 4.10, KDE can now use an appmenu instead of the classic menu, and two styles are available: a menu bar at the top of the screen (a global menu) that's hidden by default and revealed on mouse over or a menu button on the window decoration:

Appmenu as a titlebar button

Top screen menubar

The appmenu works with GTK applications too - here's Nautilus (GTK3) running in KDE 4.10 with appmenu enabled (as a top of screen menubar, also known as global menu):

Appmenu for KDE has been available for a while (in fact we wrote about an initial implementation HERE), but it wasn't integrated by default until the latest KDE SC 4.10.

The option to enable the KDE appmenu is a bit hard to discover, so here's how to do it.

To use an appmenu in KDE, firstly make sure appmenu-qt is installed. In Kubuntu, install it using:

sudo apt-get install appmenu-qt

You may also want to install appmenu-qt5 for Qt5 apps:

sudo apt-get install appmenu-qt5

For GTK applications, you'll also need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk

Also, to avoid getting double menus (both in the application window and as a titlebar button / top menubar) for GTK3 applications, you'll also have to edit the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file (or create it if it doesn't exist):

kate ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

And under "[Settings]" (if the file didn't exist, add "[Settings]" without the quotes at the top of the file), add this:

gtk-shell-shows-menubar = 1

(thanks to chenxiaolong for the tip)

Then, to enable the appmenu, go to System Settings > Application Appearance > Style and on the "Fine Tuning" tab, at the bottom you should have: "Menubar style" and there you can select between: "in application", "title bar button" or "top screen menubar" (global menu):

Click Apply and that's it!

See also: How to upgrade to KDE 4.10 in Kubuntu 12.04 or 12.10