I recently blogged about integrating menus in an X11 window manager’s window borders, and I assumed that this would require quite a lot of changes to both GTK+ and the window manager, with an API to communicate between them, but it seems that it may be far simpler than that. I came across a project called gnome-globalmenu which takes window borders out of applications and places them in the panel, without any changes to the applications. Using a similar method, the window border could grab the menus, and then a transparent theme could used to blend in toolbars, tabs, scrollbars and so on like in my other post on the topic, if the theme so wanted.
The only problems is that it seems to work with GTK applications, so KDE and other toolkit applications, as well as applications like Firefox and Wine which draw their own menus wouldn’t be able to integrate. In this case, and for windows with no menus, a normal sized window border could just be used.
