Application menubar not visible in fullscreen apps under Unity

[Artem Popov]

Menus in Unity are okay on my system. However, when I toggle "fullscreen mode" with certain apps, the menubar disappears completely. Neither it is visible on top of the screen, nor in the application area.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Run an application, that supports fullscreen mode (Inkscape).
2. Toggle fullscreen (F11).

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar#full-screen>: "Whenever a window is full-screen (by any of the several methods application developers do this), menus should be controlled by the window rather than the menu bar, so that the program can choose whether to show its own menus."

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and help to make ubuntu better.
The behavior your are describing is the expected one (and it's the same for gnome-panel or whatever other ui). Application fullscreen is *fullscreen* and hide all other UI bits to only focus on current application.

if you still want to access to the rest of the UI, use maximized, not fullscreen.

[Artem Popov (artfwo)]

No, this behaviour is inconsistent with the "classic" desktop... Inkscape, gedit (with fullscreen plugin), GIMP and other applications do keep their menus in fullscreen-mode under Gnome. So they should in Unity.

I don't count applications, that have a "special" fullscreen mode, like Totem, EOG, MyPaint or Shotwell, as they have a different UI for their fullscreen modes, designed for specific purposes (compare them in windowed and fullscreen mode).

But rather I'm talking about more generic applications and applications with complex menus, that will benefit from menu availability. Thus, I'm reopening this bug.

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

oh, yeah mean there is no way to get the menus. I was thinking that you were talking about "menubar" as the top panel, not the application menu. Right, that's something to take care into account. Thanks for your bug report!

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

I'm adding an ayatana-design task so that it's discuss design-wise before implementation (so unity task incomplete as long as ayatana-design task not fix released)

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

I think the design is there https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenuBar#Full-screen windows and also there's a bug report too bug 591189 linked with https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/other-dx-n-application-menus

[Didier Roche-Tolomelli (didrocks)]

Excellent! thanks for the pointer Omer :)

[Leonardo Augusto Pereira (odraencoded)]

Reporting that this bug still persists on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as of 25 May 2014.