Global Menu

A macOS-style menu bar for Noctalia Shell. The focused application's menus move into the top bar: the app name plus one label per top-level menu, with a popup that renders the full menu tree — checkmarks, accelerators, submenus and keyboard navigation — and activates items in the real application. Clicking the app name opens a macOS-style application menu (About, Minimize, Maximize, Fullscreen, Resize and Quit), and menu labels that do not fit the bar move under a » button instead of being cut off.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	amancode22/global-menu
Entries	Bar widget: menubar; panel: menu; service: service

Requirements

• python3 with python3-dbus and python3-gi on PATH (the manifest declares exactly these). The plugin spawns its Python companion daemon automatically; you never run it by hand.
• wtype on PATH if you want shortcut menus: item clicks either activate a GTK action on the application's own action bus (GIMP-style mappings) or synthesize real keystrokes into the focused window.
• Window tracking uses the standard wlr_foreign_toplevel_management_unstable_v1 Wayland protocol, so any compositor that speaks it works identically — Hyprland, niri, sway, river, Wayfire, labwc, KWin, MangoWC and others. No compositor-specific IPC (hyprctl, niri msg, swaymsg, ...) is used.
• For native menus, the application must either register with the AppMenu registrar (most Qt, Electron, Chromium and Firefox apps) or export a GTK menubar (GTK 3/4 apps). Applications that do neither fall back to curated shortcut menus or window/session actions.

Usage

Once enabled, open Noctalia's settings and add the Global Menu (menubar) widget to your bar. The widget appears only when a window is focused.

• Click a menu label in the bar to open the popup on that menu; click the same label again (or re-click the app name) to close it. Switching labels while the popup is open closes and reopens it, so it re-anchors under the freshly clicked label like on macOS.
• Click the application name to open the app menu: About <app> (opens an info view with the app id, menu source and window state), Minimize, Maximize, Fullscreen (with live checkmarks), a Resize group (Restore Size, Maximize, Fullscreen) and Quit <app> — which activates the application's own Quit item when it exports one, and otherwise closes every window of the app.
• Inside the popup: Up/Down move the selection, Right enters a submenu, Left goes back, Return activates. Clicks work too, and a back row with breadcrumbs appears inside submenus.
• Menu labels that do not fit the bar's width budget stay reachable under the » button, which opens the popup with the overflowed menus listed.
• Open or close the popup from a terminal:

noctalia msg panel-toggle amancode22/global-menu:menu

Custom shortcut menus

Your own per-app mappings override the shipped ones. Drop JSON files with the same format as the bundled mappings in daemon/shortcuts/apps.zip into:

~/.config/noctalia/global-menu/shortcuts/apps

To have them picked up, toggle any plugin setting (which triggers a config push) or reload the plugin. Changing the Shortcut menus setting instantly enables or disables this whole source in the daemon.

Settings

Plugin-level settings are edited under Settings → Plugins (the gear on the plugin row); the two widget settings are edited where the widget is added.

Setting	Type	Default	Description
show_app_name	bool	true	Show the focused app's name in front of its menus.
shortcut_menus	bool	true	Curated menus for apps that export none; clicks activate GTK actions or send keystrokes (wtype).
fallback_menus	bool	true	Window and session actions for apps with no menu at all.
max_menus	int (widget)	0	Hard cap on top-level menu labels in the bar; 0 shows every menu.
bar_max_width	int (widget)	0	Max width in px for the app name and menu labels before the rest moves under »; 0 fits to half of the screen width.

IPC

The service entry accepts two events (services have no output, so target all):

noctalia msg plugin amancode22/global-menu:service all refresh

Re-requests the menu tree for the focused window.

noctalia msg plugin amancode22/global-menu:service all reload-shortcuts

Reloads custom shortcut mappings from ~/.config/noctalia/global-menu/shortcuts/apps.

Notes

• Spawned processes. A python3 companion daemon (daemon/globalmenu_daemon.py) is started with the plugin and owns all D-Bus and Wayland work; it is stopped when the plugin is disabled, reloaded or uninstalled. Shortcut activation may run wtype.
• Network. The Luau entries talk to the daemon over 127.0.0.1 only (loopback HTTP on an ephemeral port); no external hosts are contacted.
• Files. Runtime state (pid file, cached menu data) lives under the plugin's data directory; custom shortcut mappings are read from ~/.config/noctalia/global-menu/shortcuts/apps.

How it works

A service entry spawns the Python daemon and streams its JSON output. Menu sources, in order of preference per focused application:

1. com.canonical.dbusmenu via the AppMenu registrar
2. org.gtk.Menus
3. Curated shortcut mappings (bundled in daemon/shortcuts/apps.zip)
4. Fallback window and session actions

The bar widget renders the focused app's name and its top-level menu labels and hides itself entirely when there is nothing to show. Because the shell gives a bar widget no width to read, the strip is budgeted from the bar's output width (or the Menu bar width budget setting) using conservative text estimates.

Troubleshooting

• Widget never appears. Check that python3-dbus and python3-gi are installed; on failure the plugin raises a notification saying exactly that. Plugin log lines carry the [global-menu] prefix.
• "No menu for this window" in the popup. The focused app exposes neither a D-Bus menu nor a GTK menubar and shortcut/fallback menus are disabled (or the app has no curated mapping). Try enabling Shortcut menus and Fallback menus.
• Shortcut menu clicks do nothing. Install wtype; it is the only way to synthesize keystrokes into a Wayland window without compositor-specific calls.
• Menus are stale after changing an app's own settings. Toggle the popup closed and open, or reload the plugin, to force a fresh tree.

Credits

This plugin is a port of orbit-global-menu by Unmade760, adapted to run as a Noctalia Shell plugin. Special thanks to Unmade760 for making the original extension — this project would not exist without it.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later; see LICENSE.