How to Enable Global Menu in XFCE Desktop

Last updated: July 14, 2017

xfce global menu

To save screen space, Ubuntu Unity uses Mac OS X style global menu that integrates applications’ menu bar into the top panel.

Thanks to TopMenu developer and Webupd8 Team for building the project into PPA, now XFCE Desktop has a plugin to enable the Mac style global menu bar.

How to install TopMenu plugin for XFCE:

For (X)Ubuntu 14.04, (X)Ubuntu 14.10, (X)Ubuntu 15.04, and Linux Mint 17/17.1, this Xfce plugin is available in the webupd8 PPA.

1. Open terminal from the application menu. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:webupd8team/mate

2. Update system package cache, install “xfce4-topmenu-plugin” as well as other extra plugins.

sudo apt-get update
 
sudo apt-get install xfce4-topmenu-plugin libtopmenu-gtk3 libtopmenu-qt topmenu-mozilla-extension

3. After installing this plugin, you have to restart Xfce session by logging out and back in to load the Topmenu modules.

4. Finally, right-click on panel and navigate to Panel -> Panel Preferences. Under items tab, add “TopMenu” and change its position.

For issues, please reports to gitorious.org/projects/topmenu/issues

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One response to How to Enable Global Menu in XFCE Desktop

  1. It’s extraneous to manually install anything but xfce4-topmenu-plugin. All these other packages will be installed as its dependencies automatically. So the apt-get install would read:

    sudo apt-get install xfce4-topmenu-plugin