MenuBar becomes difficult to access in the lower display when in a vertical multimonitor setup

[James Legg]

Binary package hint: unity

When there are two monitors arranged vertically, a menu bar appears at top of the lower display. This menu bar is difficult to use, as the mouse pointer can easily overshoot it. (It loses the benefit of Fitt's law here). The menu bar at the top does not correspond with the selected window if it is on the bottom display.

I have an 1280 by 800 pixel internal laptop display with a 1280 by 1024 external display above it. This bug occurs on the 11.04 Desktop live CD.

For best usability, I don't think there should be a menu bar or panel in the middle of the virtual desktop.

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Note from design: see bug# 931384 for desired solution to mouse pointer overshoot. See bug #751605 for the 'windows maximise on to the wrong display' issue.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Confirmed still an issue in current Precise.

The logical fix for this would be to set pointer barriers for top/bottom configs as well as side-by-side.

[Stewart Wilson (stewartw)]

As Bryce says, the desired behaviour is to use permeable pointer barriers to briefly hold the cursor at the top and bottom of displays, as well as on the sides.
Please see the 'Top Bar and Global Menu-Targeting the Top Bar' section of the multi-monitor specification:
https://docs.google.com/a/canonical.com/document/d/1aHvJ-iIw-59bXTYBmIhQqEx0za2h9jpFE_RhZ2VOvJc/edit#bookmark=id.jcx28ut5mx5y