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just installed Emacs 24 on a ubuntu precise OS. The menu bar in the top panel is missing a number of options (e.g. using Auctex, all the Latex options).

I recall seeing on the web somewhere that it was possible to have the menu on top of the Emacs frame rather than the unity default of the top panel. There is an answer on SO for how to enable the global menubar in ubuntu. Can someone please point me to how to disable it in the global menu until it gets to the point where they play well together.

Thanks

Tahnoon Pasha
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  • hi @katspaugh I think you're possibly right, but I don't know how to migrate it. – Tahnoon Pasha Oct 09 '12 at 02:51
  • Hi @wvxvw unfortunately its for all modes. At launch (lisp-interaction mode, scratch buffer), the 'file' menu is hidden by the Emacs logo above the start button. – Tahnoon Pasha Oct 09 '12 at 02:52
  • The problem has been discussed before for earlier versions of Emacs. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7497440/how-to-enable-global-menu-bar-for-emacs-on-ubuntu-unity-11-04 – raju-bitter Oct 09 '12 at 11:37

3 Answers3

7

Ubuntu has a hardcoded hack to disable the global menubar for applications matching certain filename patterns. emacs is among those, as is firefox, another popular program that suffers from the same sorts of problems of GTK detached menubars not updating in the usual way that X programs expect them to.

Try running update-alternatives to select emacs24 as your default Emacs, then use emacs to start it, rather than emacs24.

JSON
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  • I had the same issue when starting emacs 24 via the dash searching for "emacs". It seems to execute "emacs24" in that case. As a workaround I started it via Alt+F2 with just "emacs" and locked it in the launcher bar for future use. – Bernhard Kausler Feb 19 '13 at 09:00
3

I was using the symlink method mentioned by @Bernhard Kausler, but found I couldn't pin the icon that resulted from staring emacs from the shell in this way without it reverting to using the global menu.

I got a working unity launcher shortcut with this .desktop file:

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Icon[en_NZ]=emacs
Name[en_NZ]=Gnu Emacs 24
Exec=emacs
Name=Gnu Emacs 24
Icon=emacs
StartupWMClass=Emacs24

Now I can have emacs pinned to the launcher and it launches with its own menu bar.

muskrat
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1

You can just create a symbolic link to the emacs??? command you use to launch emacs, and if the symbolic link's name is exactly 'emacs', it will not use the global menu when launched.

This is a known bug with Emacs dynamic menus where changing major modes adds or removes entries from the menu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/appmenu-gtk/+bug/673302

It's unfortunate that the names of the blacklisted apps are hard coded into the appmenu-gtk package, and that there does not seem to be a way to add items without touching the source code.

raju-bitter
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