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

Twitter

I'm a freelance blogger who started using Ubuntu in 2007 and wishes to share my experiences and some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers. Please comment to let me know if the tutorial is outdated! And, notify me if you find any typo/grammar/language mistakes. English is not my native language. Contact me via ubuntuhandbook1@gmail.com Buy me a coffee: Buymeacoffee | https://ko-fi.com/ubuntuhandbook1 |

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