Will there be a way to disable auto-hide behavior of global application menu in Unity. While I would prefer to have this behavior disabled by default (as it is bad UX), it looks like it's here to stay, so I'm wondering if, as a user, I will be able to turn it off.
Ubuntu – Can auto-hide for the application menu be turned off in Unity
appmenuautohidemenu barpanelunity
Related Solutions
No. There are no central options for the panel. You can often install and uninstall indicators through the software center, although some of them I think need to be changed through the command line.
But in general, there are very few options for the panel. There's no default way to rearrange the indicators, provide auto-hiding, easily hide or show indicators, hide or show the global menu, change the location or size of the panel, change it's color, etc. These sorts of options have all been removed in Unity.
There's one or two settings you can change in CCSM. Changing the transparency comes to mind. But other than that, it's pretty much stuck the way it is.
If you want one particular application to not use the global menu you can set a little known (but very useful) environment variable: UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0
Thus, the following entered in a terminal will start gimp with the global-menu disabled:
UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6
You'll note the global menu is disabled for Gimp - it's now with the main Gimp window.
As a suggestion, if you launch Gimp via a launcher icon, copy the /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop file to your home folder ~/.local/share/applications (create if necessary).
Change the exec= value to a script file - for example /home/dad/launchgimp.sh
Copy and paste UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6 into this new file and give it execute rights (chmod +x ~/launchgimp.sh)
Logout and login.
Best Answer
16.04 and later (unity 7)
In addition to the gsettings menu option introduced in 15.04, this has been added to Settings - Appearance:
15.04, 15.10 & 14.04
15.04 now has the ability to toggle the global menu as well as the local integrated menus (Via System Settings - Appearance - Behaviour tab) to be permanently on or off.
If you are running a fully up-to-date version of 14.04, this same ability has been backported.
To switch on permanently:
To switch off i.e. to autohide:
12.10 through to 13.10 + 14.10
There is an implementation report which has some speculative suggestions as to the global menu including the ability to have the ability to always turn-on the global menu.
Unfortunately for these versions of Ubuntu the auto-hide ability was not implemented
12.04
The global menu cannot be prevented from autohiding using the standard Unity install.
Unlike previous versions of Unity where opening an application never showed the global menu, in 12.04, the global menu appears for two seconds after an application has been launched before fading.
... you can also delay the autohiding of the global menu for up-to 10 seconds
third-party solutions
Recently ubuntu-forums published a solution to always display the global-menu (i.e. it never hides).
This solution involves adding a custom version of Unity to your installation. Thus - you are dependent on the PPA maintainer for future Unity releases etc. Whether this dog eats your cat - I'll leave for you to monitor the ubuntuforums thread. I will not vouch for its veracity or stability.