GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 593062
GIMP doesn't play nice with gnome globalmenu
Last modified: 2010-04-28 06:53:41 UTC
http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/ Correct behavior: menu is visible in top panel regardless of which GIMP window is in focus. Because not everyone uses a globalmenu, this may have to be a toggle added to GIMP. This is a requisite for replacing PS + OS X with GIMP + Ubuntu. (Although I have been getting by with focus-on-hover set in compiz, I'm not the average graphic designer, and it's still very annoying.)
I like the concept of a global menu and would like to review a patch to improve GIMP's cooperation with a global menu, setting milestone to Future.
We already have a global menu (it's e.g. used for the right-click popup and for the OS X menubar). Do you have a proper API that enables this gnome globalmenu, or do you hack around in the active window's internals? Will gnome globalmenu behave like the global menu on the mac (trading mouse precision for speedy access to the menu, following fitt's law which was devised on small monitors in the last millenium)?
That last comment's tone doesn't come across as intended... but my questions remain of course.
I find Fitt's law extremely relevant today, and I make use of it constantly, whether with gnome globalmenu or xmonad. I have tried many different kinds of menus, the circular menu thing is pretty cool-- as it stands though, the default menu system on Windows and the platforms that unquestioningly mimic it simply isn't good enough. Plus it's ugly.
And right now, I think it may be a bit of a hack, but it is a hack proven to work well with properly written applications.
What is required to make it work? What are you APIs?
I've never seen the code for either, so I don't know. Worst case scenario, adding a toggle to display the full menu bar in all gimp windows.
BTW, why is GIMP listed as "Perfect" in globalmenu's own application compatiblity list? http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/wiki/ApplicationCompatibility
Probably because they just did a quick check instead of actually seeing if it was /usable/. All native gtk apps 'work', this is a matter of it only working when the image window is in focus.
Could you try this with GIT Master or 2.7.0? And it seems like this is documented in http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/detail?id=300 already.
Well, not sure if it works in 2.7, but my GIMP install is hosed now.. ethan@home:~$ gimp gimp: error while loading shared libraries: libgegl-0.1.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory ethan@home:~$ Installed from some dude's PPA..
Reinstalled package to no avail. I'll just leave it removed for now.
There is no API in gtk to properly do what globalmenu needs here, there is not even a standard describing what apps should do. Globalmenu apparently doesn't cope with non-dialog toplevel windows (gimp's dock windows). Is it that unusual to have floating palettes? Heck, I haven't even heared about globalmenu until this bug was filed. Unless there is an API, or at least a standard telling what to do, I consider globalmenu a hack that works by coincidence with "normal" gtk apps (whatever that is). Cloaing as WONTFIX.
There is a fix to this problem, that should be incredibly simple: Add an option to show the menu bar in all windows. Previous versions of GIMP had a menu bar in the toolbox window, as well as one in the document window; in this case you would just make them identical.
We won't add hacks to GIMP in order to make it cope with extrernal hacks.
I've tested 2.7 series single window mode and it works fine, go ahead and close this.
I think we could consider changing the GIMP code to play more nicely with globalmenu, but we should certainly not put the responsibility to make this work on the user through an option. From a user point of view this stuff should just work without tweaking any options or settings.
Oh by the way, http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/359 Ubuntu Netbook now defaults to a global menu.
Ah, seems like they want to add a dedicated API and don't want to rely on hacks. So there's probably no point in approaching this now?