bad usability using global menu when tiling windows

[kikl]

Binary package hint: unity

The new unity interface lets you tile the windows of certain applications. You drag one application to the side and it will take up 1/2 of the screen space. Do the same thing on the other side and you get two applications next to each other. This is useful if you want to interact between the applications, for example drag and drop stuff between the applications.

However, when tiling the applications, the menu bar of the active app is displayed in the global menu. If two instances of the same application are open, you just don't know which instance is active. Furthermore, it is a nuisance and unintuitive to move away from your application to the global menu if you want to control the application. Therefore, the implementation of the global menu impedes on the usability of the tiling feature - copied from windows 7.

My suggestion: Use the global menu only, if the active application is maximized. This helps save screen space - the main purpose of the global menu. Don't use the global menu, if the active application isn't maximized in particular if the apps are tiled next to each other. Use "local" menus or conventional menus in this instance.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: unity 3.8.10-0ubuntu2
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Date: Fri Apr 22 21:22:18 2011
DistUpgraded: Fresh install
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[Andreas Grois (soulsource)]

This is a serious issue imho. There has to be an option to disable the global menu for windows which are not maximized. It's awful that one
a) can not have the focus following the mouse,
b) has therefore first to click on the window if one wants to access its menu and
c) has to move back to the top of the screen to get there.

In the worst case one has to move from the current window, which might reside in the top left part of the screen, to the lower right part to click the other window, and then has to move back the whole way to get to the menu one initally wanted to open.

[KillerKiwi (killerkiwi2005)]

try having writer and calc side by side.. i dare you

[ShackJack (shackjack)]

+1 to this bug; there are several other scenarios where the global menu bar would cause usability issues, for example on multi monitor setups - where your window may be on the right window, yet you still must go all the way over to the left monitor to access.

An option to disable the global menu should be patched in ASAP

[kikl (kilian-klaiber)]

I hope "wishlist" doesn't mean that this bug is not considered to be a bug. I've read similar bug reports on launchpad.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

As far as I can tell from the description, this bug isn't actually specific to tiled windows. It applies to any situation where there are multiple windows open for the same application, and it's hard to tell which one is showing its menus in the menu bar. Tiling two windows is just the worst case of this, because then window overlapping is not available as a visual cue as to which window is focused.

The lack of distinction between focused and unfocused windows is bug 534799, so I'm marking this as a duplicate.