Can global application menu be made to behave better with GIMP?

Question

I actually like the global menu of Unity.

However, for GIMP, it's totally broken and terrible. Gimp uses multiple unassociated windows for its toolbars, and as soon as a toolbar gets focus the global menu disappears because the window the menu belongs to is not focused. So you have to switch focus back to the main image window. It's painful because you need to alternate between using toolbars and using the menu all the time, but every time you use the toolbars the menu disappears.

My question:

• Is there any way to improve this behaviour in GIMP? Eg, by not having the toolbars as separate windows, or by setting compiz so it doesn't treat them as such?

• Or failing that, how can I disable the global menu just for one application?

Using precise, with Gimp 2.6.12-1ubuntu1

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Possibly easier is to edit the Exec field in /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop to

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6 %U

Answer 3

This problem has been solved with the latest version of Gimp, In Gimp 2.8 you can use single window mode, Hence no more disappearing global menu.

Installing Gimp 2.8:

Gimp 2.8 can be installed by adding PPA for Ubuntu 12.04. Follow these steps:

• Before installing Gimp 2.8 its important to remove the old version of Gimp.

• Hit Alt+Ctrl+T to open terminal and run following commands:

  sudo apt-get autoremove --purge gimp
  

• Run the following commands to add the PPA and install Gimp 2.8.

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install gimp
  

How to enable single window mode in Gimp 2.8?

Open Gimp and goto Windows menu and select Single-Window Mode

That's it!

Answer 4

1 . Open the file for editing:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop

2 . Locate the following line and delete it

Exec=gimp-2.8 %U

3 . Insert the following line

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.8 %U

4 . Also in the top of the file add the following line

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

See the file contents in the picture below: https://i.stack.imgur.com/PZTur.png

See the result in the picture below: https://i.stack.imgur.com/rkl83.png