Finally, it’s in…

On Monday this week, something I have been working to make happen for quite some time finally happened: the appmenu Qt patch got merged in the qt/4.8 branch.

Appmenu-qt is both a patch for Qt (now merged in) introducing a plugin system for menubars, as well as a plugin using said plugin system to expose menubars on DBus. This plugin makes it possible to move menubars from the application windows to a top-level panel. It has been part of Ubuntu for the last two releases where it is used to implement the top-level menubar in Unity and to provide the “Menu” button in the panel of Kubuntu Plasma Netbook.

If you want to learn more about appmenu-qt, I invite you to read these two posts I wrote when it was developed:

If you are interested, here is what is necessary to get appmenu-qt working for KDE Plasma:

Qt 4.8 (which has not been released yet),

the appmenu-qt plugin, version 0.2.0 (older versions won’t work with Qt 4.8),

the Plasma Menubar widget.

The nice thing about appmenu is that its implementation is toolkit-agnostic:

appmenu-gtk provides similar functionality for GTK,

the global menubar extension does the same for Firefox and Thunderbird,

the LibreOffice menubar plugin does the same for LibreOffice.



