Comment 36 for bug 674138

here's a related bug, which deals with unity on big screens (i.e. the global menu is lots of distance away from small app windows on big screens).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/682788/comments/60

i hacked the appmenu-gtk package for a proof-of-concept: the globalmenu always is shown, but when the app is not maximized, the local (classical) menu is shown additionally.

+ it solves the focus-follows-mouse compatibility issue (i am very dear of sloppy mouse focus myself for ~14 years ;)
+ for big screens it greatly reduces the distances to travel (for apps that still rely on heavy menu use, e.g. inkscape, libreoffice,...)
+ used it the last days, and it seems to integrate well with the rest of the desktop.

- it would need to implemented in appmenu's toolkit packages, i.e. for each toolkit :/ right now i just hacked the gtk bridge, we would at least need patches for QT and mozilla's XUL toolkit for any sensible coherence, still leaving out e.g. libreoffice (but it's not integrated yet anyway)
- how to enable that feature?
i don't think unity will use it as a default (as they don't use sloppy-mouse). we cannot auto-enable it with e.g. sloppy-mouse setting, as there are also other beneficial use cases. the best probably would be a switch somewhere in the gtk system configuration, but i'm not sure how to do this cross-toolkit without introducing a lot of dependencies. dbus? the easiest would be an environment variable (which would e.g. be set in /etc/environment or on login), but then the feature is not very discoverable.