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memilanuk
Asked: 2014-03-13 20:40:09 +0800 CST

How can I launch a specific application bypassing the global menu in Unity?

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So, trying to get up to speed with LaTex in vim/gvim... problem is the beginners tutorial for vim-latexsuite assumes gvim and the gui menus. Okay, got gvim right here. Problem is, under Unity and the global app menu, the menus are truncated and don't show the keyboard shortcuts that they should for most entries, or in the case of the TeX-Suite menus, entries like '2: Article' are simply truncated to '2: '. Not helpful at all!

I know the menus themselves work - starting gvim using sudo gvim, which does not use the global app menu but the local menus, looks just fine - like gvim on any other platform or desktop, i.e. like it should.

How do I force that behaviour under Unity for a regular user (i.e. not using sudo)?

menu

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    This should work (thanks @Braiam):

     UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gvim

    Running the above command from a terminal will launch a gvim instance with its own menus. So, to create a launcher on your desktop, open a file called ~/Desktop/gvim.desktop with the following contents:

        [Desktop Entry]
    Name=gvim
    Comment=Run gvim with menus
    Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gvim
    Type=Application
    Icon=/usr/share/icons/HighContrast/48x48/apps/vim.png
    StartupNotify=true
    Categories=Utility;Editor;

    The env command allows you to run a specific command in a temporarily modified environment and is needed to pass the variable when you launch a program using a .desktop file.

    If you prefer the command line way, you now make an alias for the command above by adding this line to your ~/.bashrc:

    alias gvim="UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gvim"

    Now, open a new terminal, run gvim and you'll have it menu free.

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