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Comment by akling | Hacker News Reader

I removed the global menu bar after realizing that it's incredibly tedious to use at large resolutions. It made some sense at 640x480 and 800x600, but at 1080p and beyond, you run into a great deal of mouse travel between a window and its menu bar.

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Travel distance is not the right metric. The question is how easy is it to acquire the desired menu as a target and select it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Putting the menu bar at the edge of the screen effectively makes it an infinite sized target so it is much easier to target and select. Menus at the top of a window are easily overshot and missed. Travel distance is easily solved by appropriate acceleration in the pointer driver.

I much rather have my browser tabs there as I need to switch them much more often than accessing the menu.

> but at 1080p and beyond, you run into a great deal of mouse travel between a window and its menu bar.

1. Somehow this feels Okay on Mac.

2. You don't actually have to travel the mouse if you use hot keys.

3. The coolest thing the global menu system can give is application-agnostic menu searching.

3. can be achieved without a global menu. Menus just have to be registered with a global API.

Obviously. But I doubt app authors will bother registering menus with a global API if the global menu is not a platform standard every user expects them to follow (which is how it is in the Mac world).

This was also illustrated by Ubuntu by the way. When Ubuntu had the global menu ootb most of the Linux GUI apps supported it. A significant portion of the same apps don't seem to support it in other distros/DEs even if I configure them (the DEs) to use the global menu. I tried Xubuntu, Manjaro KDE and ended up using classic in-window menu set-up because many apps used it anyway and I want the thing to be uniform (the situation when some apps use the global menu when many use their own seems ugly to me).

Any reason why the OS couldn't require menus to be registered only to draw them along the top of the application window?

Because everybody can draw their own menu in their window. Like Sublime and VSCode do.

Nevertheless, if you require that, why not make the place where the menu is displayed configurable? KDE does - it offers 3 options: the global Mac-style menu (which you can put anywhere, even in the middle of the screen if you want), classic Windows-style menus or "hamburger" menu buttons (utterly inconvenient but I'm still glad there is an option for those who like it).

If the speed and acceleration is correctly configured, the mouse doesn't have more travel to do at a higher resolution.

The DPI is also relevant. I find the global menu fine on my 13" MacBook even though it's 2560x1600, but it can be a bit tedious on my 28" display when I have multiple applications open side-by-side.

The biggest downside of the Mac's global menu bar, to me personally, is that sometimes I lost track of what the active application is at the moment, and e.g. look for menu options for Chrome, can't find them, look to the left, and discover that the menu bar is for Terminal. It doesn't happen often, but often enough, and very annoying when it does.

With a menu bar in each window, there's very little chance of this kind of confusion.

The trade-off for the mouse travel is only needing to align the click on the X-axis.

That's only one way. Don't forget about the return trip.

Exactly: if implemented right and there's no gap between the menu and the top of the screen where the cursor does nothing, then you can just mostly jam the mouse in the general direction of the menu item.

Notably, Microsoft managed to bungle this initially in Windows with the task bar: there was a one-pixel gap between the buttons and the bottom of the screen, so you had to aim for the buttons or to readjust the cursor each time. (Though personally I find the downward motion more awkward anyway, both because the wrist action is weird and because the wrist and the wrist support are in the way.)

A minute of silence for Ubuntu's unity, where they completely solved top bar UX by having the option to have it in the window title bar. God I wish they hadn't abandoned development on it.

Technically gnome expands on this, allowing you to put even more stuff in the top bar.

But yeah, I miss unity too.

I really prefer the ubuntu way to the Gnome one. Currently, very few actually productive apps use the gnome 3 way, and it's not nearly as standardized across Desktops as the menu bar is. On top of that, menu bars behave the same way across all applications. You click them, and get corresponding actions and menu items you can read and skim through. The Gnome 3 way is a lot less unified, because you'll have to decipher icons and guess at what they do ( save for the simple ones like a +).

This is extra frustrating to me since I absolutely love everything else about the modern Gnome UX, but the refusal to bring in a top menu bar or at least integrate it for powerful apps like gimp, vscode or blender stings and makes it so many times you have 3 top bars wasting vertical space in maximized apps when it could be two or even one.(Activities-button bar, Window title, GIMP menu bar)

This makes a lot of sense. I wish Apple did this, too.

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