Ubuntu Unity: Integrating with global menu bar

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Where can I begin investigating on how to add menu bar integration for a non-Gtk app when running under Ubuntu Unity? A few quick Google searches with keywords like "ubuntu unity menu bar integration" did not reveal anything interesting.

This is good to know if one wants to create a menu for, for example, an SDL app, or if I wanted to integrate GNUstep's menus into Unity.


Looks like I need to investigate "dbusmenu" project and the "com.canonical.dbusmenu" interface. Does anyone have nice docs on that?


Some useful code is available in this code that integrates Java Swing menus with DBusMenu. It's from the java-swing-ayatana project which appears to aim at improving integration of Swing apps into Ubuntu.


I wrote some code in MiniDbus-Menu repository on BitBucket. (Yes, I accidentally inconsistently named the repository. Sue me. :-) It comes with some notes on my explorations in README.md.

Unfortunately, the code doesn't work yet, so the question remains open. I'd love to know what I did wrong in my code!

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jokerdino On

You can read this question in Ask Ubuntu:

Ted Gould, the author of dbusmenu-glib, gives some pointers on how to hook up your app menu to the global menu bar. I could rephrase his answer but I think it is preferred that you actually read the linked answer.

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Jamel Toms On

For getting this to work with Java Applications, check out solution 2 on this blog:

Integrating Java Swing Applications with Unity Global Menu