Can global application menu be made to behave better with GIMP?

If you want one particular application to not use the global menu you can set a little known (but very useful) environment variable: UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

Thus, the following entered in a terminal will start gimp with the global-menu disabled:

UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6

You'll note the global menu is disabled for Gimp - it's now with the main Gimp window.

As a suggestion, if you launch Gimp via a launcher icon, copy the /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop file to your home folder ~/.local/share/applications (create if necessary).

Change the exec= value to a script file - for example /home/dad/launchgimp.sh

Copy and paste UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6 into this new file and give it execute rights (chmod +x ~/launchgimp.sh)

Logout and login.

Possibly easier is to edit the Exec field in /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop to

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.6 %U

This problem has been solved with the latest version of Gimp, In Gimp 2.8 you can use single window mode, Hence no more disappearing global menu.

Installing Gimp 2.8:

Gimp 2.8 can be installed by adding PPA for Ubuntu 12.04. Follow these steps:

• Before installing Gimp 2.8 its important to remove the old version of Gimp.

• Hit Alt+Ctrl+T to open terminal and run following commands:

  sudo apt-get autoremove --purge gimp
  

• Run the following commands to add the PPA and install Gimp 2.8.

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install gimp
  

How to enable single window mode in Gimp 2.8?

Open Gimp and goto Windows menu and select Single-Window Mode

That's it!

1 . Open the file for editing:

sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop

2 . Locate the following line and delete it

Exec=gimp-2.8 %U

3 . Insert the following line

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 gimp-2.8 %U

4 . Also in the top of the file add the following line

#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open

See the file contents in the picture below: http://i.stack.imgur.com/PZTur.png

See the result in the picture below: http://i.stack.imgur.com/rkl83.png