How can I have per-window menus in OS X?

On a huge monitor (or multiple monitors) it's quite a round trip (I pack a lunch) to move the mouse pointer from a window near the bottom of the screen all the way up to the top of the monitor to select something from a menu and all the way back down to the window.

I know I could move the window closer to the menu, but sometimes I have multiple windows arranged just so.

How can I have the menu appear at the top of the window as it does in at least a few other OS's or WM's?

Well, there is DejaMenu, which gives you a pop-up menu in-situ that has the same contents as the Menu bar at the top of the screen (especially handy when you're working on the second monitor.)

It used to be possible to get it to run as soon as you pressed the 'roller ball' button on a Mighty Mouse, but that seems to have stopped working since OS X 10.5. That was a nice way to trigger it, but there is an additional tool DMTrigger which will run DejaMenu in the same way.

This behavior is by design on OS X. The only exceptions are X11 applications. You can customize your OS X menu bar though - you may find this useful.

As others have noted you can't.

Having the menu bar at the top makes it easy to hit with the mouse (which is, of course a usability win). Of course, then you have to get back to your window (which is not so good).

Think of it as a reason to learn the keyboard shortcuts.