How to enable global menu bar for Emacs on Ubuntu (Unity 11.04)

Question

I use latest Ubuntu 11.04 which has Unity desktop. I am learning to use Emacs 23.

As you know, Unity has top panel. I want to enable global menu bar for Emacs so that I could save valuable screen space. (I use small screen laptop)

How to enable global menu bar? Your help will be much appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

1. Use your favorite editor to open this file: /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/menuproxies/libappmenu.so
2. Find the word "emacs"
3. Change "emacs" to other word
4. Save the file
5. sudo ldconfig

update:The file of "libappmenu.so" moved to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/menuproxies" now in ubuntu 12.04.

Answer 2

appmenu-gtk (which provides the global menu bar) specifically blacklisted emacs since it does not play nicely together so unfortunately you probably can't use it with emacs.