Today Plasma 5.9.0 became available in KDE neon User Edition. With it comes the return of global menus along with other awesome sauce features.
To enable global menus open System Settings, go into the Application Style category, and in the Widget Style settings you will find a tab called Fine Tuning. On this tab you can find the new Menubar options. You can change to either a Title Bar Button, which will tuck the menu into a tiny button into the window decoration bar at the top, or the Application Menu widget, allowing the associated Plasma panel to supply the menu in a fixed location.
To apply the change, your applications need to be restarted, so ideally you’ll simply log out and back in again.
To add an Application Menu to Plasma, simply right click on the desktop and add the Panel called Application Menu Bar.
Enjoy your new Plasma 5.9 with global menu bars!
💺 Blog 
I somehow fail to see why the fine tune option is needed and why it is mutually exclusive. Wouldn’t it be possible to just let the users add a panel or kwin title button and that takes care of it? Especially as while the panel more or less tells the user what to do, the kwin button doesn’t. So whenever a user enables it there, it doesn’t work yet and they don’t know why.
Probably I am missing something here, but if not: for UX reasons I’d recommend to simply strip that fine tuning option and let the users decide by adding a panel and/or kwin button (or none, if they prefer just having the olde menus)
GREAT!!! Now since Global Menus are back… what about KDE Plasma’s HUD???
It was a very (VERY) useful feature to be able to search menu entries thru KRunner!!!
I don’t understand why if I select global menu as a window decoration button from the System Settings I have to manually add the button in the windows decoration kcm too..
@lex: Something’s wrong! I didn’t have to do it!
Probably you had once customized the button layout, thus, overriding the default scheme, which included the button.
Happened to me too.
also global menu doesn’t work in all gtk apps windeco..
Maybe have to manually install some dependencies? (I’m on Neon)
Yeah I noticed the same. Doesn’t work properly with Firefox (52b). It shows the correct menu but the submenus don’t expand. Also running Neon User Edition.
The most useful feature was the ability to have the menu bar as a separate auto-hiding panel, NOT a Plasma panel tho. This was present in KDE4. The problem with the plasma panel si that A) it’s always there even if no application is running and B) the current hiding mechanism is quite ugly.
Can we have this feature back too?
Thanks for the awesome work!
What I did notice is that adding the app menu widget to an existing panel and setting it to show as a button instead of full menu is very buggy.
First, it doesn’t show any icon, just an empty space.
Then, if I assign a shortcut to it, when typing the shortcut, instead of showing the appmenu just like when clicking the widget, it shows a horizontal menu under the panel (I had a top panel) with the root menu entries. However, clicking them would summon the entire appmenu, not just the sub-items of that root entry.
Maybe that was a packaging issue (which I doubt), but was installed on Arch Linux using the testing repository.
As I see it didn’t fit what I want (I have a top panel with borderless maximized windows and the Active Window Control widget), I just removed the testing repo and reverted.
The issue with Global Menu is that works only with default, Breeze style. I use partially Oxygen I it doesn’t work :(. Shame.
Global menu – needed improvements:
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=138998&p=372287#p372287
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It was a very (VERY) useful feature to be able to search menu entries thru KRunner!
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Then, if I assign a shortcut to it, when typing the shortcut, instead of showing the appmenu just like when clicking the widget, it shows a horizontal menu under the panel (I had a top panel) with the root menu entries.