The feature will be ported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well

Jan 25, 2015 18:35 GMT  ·  By

The development cycle for Ubuntu 15.04 still has a couple of months left and the guys and gals from Canonical are making good progress. An important improvement regarding the use of menus in the title bar has been implemented and it will be part of the stable edition to launch in April.

Ubuntu is powered by Unity, and as it stands right now, there are two ways of displaying application menus. The default one is by using the top Unity system bar, Mac OS X style. It's been present for a couple of years and the users don't really mind it. The second method is to show them in the title bar of each individual window. This option can be enabled from System Settings, Desktop, and Behaviour.

The reason for displaying menus in the title bar might not be an obvious one, but it's actually quite useful on large displays. If you are using a monitor with a large resolution, you might find yourself traveling quite a lot with the mouse to access the menus. Being able to show them in the title bar is a big plus and more and more users see the advantage in this option.

Title bar menus are also called Locally Integrated Menus

Even of the feature itself is pretty useful, it has a number of limitations. For example, the menus would fail to show in certain situations and only minimizing and maximizing the application would bring them back. Also, the hiding method is clever, but some users could do without it. So, the developers are now implementing a new way of showing them, permanently.

The main advantage of this method is that a lot of space is saved for each window and the end result is a much cleaner and more minimalist look. The option has been implemented for the development version of Ubuntu, and according to omgubuntu.co.uk, it will also be backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

You can check the launchpad entry for this fix and you call also check this as a new feature for Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet).

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