Locally Integrated Menus for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Over the last few months some of the Unity team members have been working hard to get some new features landed in time to be included in the Trusty Tahr due out this April.  One of the most important features that Marco Trevisan has been working on has been what we call “locally integrated menus,” which refers to having application menus appear in the application window title bar (“locally”) as opposed to in the top panel bar (“globally”).  You can choose to use this new configuration on larger screens or on the newer higher-DPI screens so application menus are closer to where you’re working, or you can choose the current configuration.  It will be your choice.  I can tell you I miss the local menus when I go use my machines running older versions of Ubuntu.  this is an exciting change.

I think Marco is better at describing the history and technical issues behind this effort. I recommend you read his post.

The user interface is a dynamic thing and a description of this change in words does not do it justice.  If you’d like to see the locally integrated menus in action, we’ve prepared an introduction video for your viewing enjoyment as well.

Kudos to Marco for his persevering work on this and to Brandon Schaefer and Chris Townsend for their reviews, testing, and support.