KDE: Can't live with it, can't live without the global menu feature it has. What I am referring to is an option in KDE that sticks all the menu bars from your applications into a global menu bar at the top of the screen, just as the every Mac I've ever seen does. It's wonderful; in addition to other advantages, you save space in your application windows and things just look all the prettier.

Once upon a time there was a patch that that did this for gnome. Actually, it still exists. Don't get excited. It's only for gnome 1.x. http://www.carcosa.net/jason/softwar...me-globalmenu/

It took me quite a while to track that down. Like others who have posted on various linux forums, I didn't even know what to search for because I didn't know the proper name for this kind of gui feature. Some of the topics I found were just people trying to describe global menus in an attempt to discover if there was a way to do it from gnome, and failing to convey the idea miserably. If I hadn't been trying to discover the same information, it might have been amusing.

At any rate, I wish to open up discusion on this kind of feature for gnome. The kinds of things I'd like to discuss are:

1.) How difficult would it be to implement?
2.) Does anyone know if there are plans to do this in the future?
3.) Would it be possible to do this with a pannel applet? Keep in mind it would need to have control over more than just the real estate it takes up on the pannel you put it on; it would have to be able to 'snip' the menu bars out of gtk app windows.
4.) What would be the best way to go about the implementation of such a feature?
5.) Is there anything that can be added on to gnome that would be able to duplicate this effect?
6.) What other Desktop environments have this besides KDE?

In my opinion, this is the only thing gnome is really lacking other than a lump of minor refinements. What do you think? Apparently Some people tend to shun the idea altogether. ( see http://kasei.us/archives/2005/04/18/menu_bar ).