How To Enable The New KDE 4.10 Appmenu (Title Bar Button Or Top Screen Menubar)

With the latest 4.10 version, KDE can now use an appmenu instead of the classic menu, and two styles are available: a menu bar at the top of the screen that's hidden by default and revealed on mouse over or a menu button on the window decoration:

Appmenu as a titlebar button

Top screen menubar

The appmenu works with GTK applications too - here's Nautilus (GTK3) running in KDE 4.10 with appmenu enabled:

Appmenu for KDE has been available for a while (in fact we wrote about an initial implementation HERE), but it wasn't integrated by default until the latest KDE SC 4.10.

The option to enable the new KDE 4.10 appmenu is a bit hard to discover, so here's how to do it.

To use an appmenu in KDE 4.10, firstly make sure appmenu-qt is installed. In Kubuntu, install it using:

sudo apt-get install appmenu-qt

For GTK applications, you'll also need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-gtk

Also, to avoid getting double menus (both in the application window and as a titlebar button / top menubar) for GTK3 applications, you'll also have to edit the ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini file (or create it if it doesn't exist):

kate ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini

And under "[Settings]" (if the file didn't exist, add "[Settings]" without the quotes at the top of the file), add this:

gtk-shell-shows-menubar = 1

(thanks to chenxiaolong for the tip)

Then, to enable the appmenu, go to System Settings > Application Appearance > Style and on the "Fine Tuning" tab, at the bottom you should have: "Menubar style" and there you can select between: "in application", "title bar button" or "top screen menubar":

See also: How to upgrade to KDE 4.10 in Kubuntu 12.04 or 12.10