Comment by wpm
Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.
Until AI can vibe-code a stable, secure global menu bar for Wayland I'm stuck on macOS for a while.
Browsers and terminals have "normal menus". Some examples would include Vivaldi and iTerm.
I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.
However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
> However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.
Sounds like the revived Unity/Unity7 still has a global menu bar, and there's a version called UnityX with Wayland support.
https://9to5linux.com/unity-7-7-desktop-environment-to-get-a...
https://unityd.org/unityx-7-7-testing/
https://gitlab.com/ubuntu-unity/unity-x/unityx#manual-instal...
Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)
Yeah you can, there's packages like xremap and input-remapper where you can define custom keyboard re-mappings. To replicate the Emacs key bindings from macOS, you can bind Ctrl+F to right arrow, Ctrl+E to End, etc. I even re-binded Cmd+C to Ctrl+C so I didn't lose any muscle memory from years of macOS shortcuts. Obviously requires some upfront time but once you get it working it works very well in my experience (and the keyboard re-mappings work at the input event level, so it works across all applications automatically).
there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.