Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

TOPIC: MENU BAR

Restoring the menu bar on GNOME Terminal in a GNOME Shell session

25th July 2020

By default, a GNOME Terminal instance does not display a menu bar and that applies not only in GNOME Shell but also on the Cinnamon Desktop environment. In the latter, it is easy enough to display the menu bar using the context menu produced by right-clicking in the window before going to Edit > Preferences and ticking the box for Show menubar by default in new terminals in the General section. After closing the Preferences dialogue, every new GNOME Terminal session will show the menu bar.

Unfortunately, it is not so easy in GNOME Shell, though the context menu route does allow you to unhide the menu bar on a temporary basis. That is because the requisite tick box is missing from the Preferences dialogue box displayed after navigating to Edit > Preferences in the menus. To address, you need to execute the following command in a terminal session:

gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Settings headerbar false

This change permanently adds the menu bar and includes the previously missing tick box, which is selected when necessary. Although GNOME Shell has a minimalist design in some aspects, making this function difficult to access seems excessive.

Making a custom button to hide or display the Google Toolbar in Firefox

27th February 2011

While adding more toolbars to Firefox is all very fine, they can take up space on the screen. Even with the big screens that many of us have these days, it's still nice to be able to see more of what we use web browsers to visit: web pages. For the Web Developer extension's toolbar, there is the Toggle Web Developer Toolbar plugin for showing and hiding the thing when so desired. As it happens, I keep it hidden until I need it and I fancied doing the same thing with the Google Toolbar but found none. Instead, I happened on a tutorial that used the Custom Buttons plugin to define a custom button. That gives you an entry named Add new button... to the context menu that appears when you right-click on the main menu bar near the top of the Firefox window. When you select the that extra entry in the menu, you get the dialogue box that you see below.

In there, that are some form fields that need filling. Button URL is an option without which you can do, but I entered "Toggle Google Toolbar" into the Name field while also sourcing an image to be used on the button instead of the default (a Google logo, naturally...). The last step is to add the code below underneath the /*CODE*/ comment line, leaving the latter in place.

const toolbar = document.getElementById("gtbToolbar");
toolbar.collapsed = !toolbar.collapsed;

With all that completed, clicking on the OK button is all that's needed to finish off the button definition. With that done, the next step is to add the button where you want it by right-clicking on the top menu bar again and selecting the Customise... entry. From the list of buttons that appears, just pick the new one and drag it to where you want it to go. Then, you're done with what might sound like a roundabout away of putting in place a space saver, but I can live with that.

Selecting SAS code in the Program Editor on UNIX

5th June 2007

Here's a possible bugbear with programming using the SAS Display Manager in UNIX, selecting sections of code and running them. In the installations that I have encountered, the mouse selection is not retained, so the code selection cannot be run. There is a fix for this that is not the most obvious. Going to the Preferences dialogue box (Tools > Options > Preferences... from the menu bar) and selecting the Editing tab brings up the screen below:

SAS Editing Preferences on UNIX

Ensuring that "Automatically store selection" is switched off, as shown above, will allow one to select and submit sections of code from a SAS program like what is normal practice with Windows SAS. Though it isn't an obvious solution, it does the trick for me.

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