Hide and Seek! where did the menu bar go?

I turned off the menu bar only to be left wondering how to get it back short of obliterating the config files.

Gun ... Foot ... shot ... blood everywhere.

The easiest and most obvious solution is to disable the feature. I'm not entirely sure how the feature is useful in normal usage and worthwhile exposing to the users (an autohide option in Fullscreen mode might be more useful than all-or-nothing) but if there is any reason to keep it...

Previous versions of inkscape repeated everything in the context menu and I'm glad it no longer does so, but when there is no menubar there needs to be an option to reenable it just as in Fullscreen mode the context menu needs an option to get out of Fullscreen mode.

KDE consistantly uses the shortcut Ctrl+M for showing and hiding the menubar, but it is fast becoming clear to me that Inkscape is going to have a disasterous illogical collection of keybindings if we try and have bindings for everything and it is a particularly bad idea to waste keybindings for infrequent actions, particularly reconfiguring the interface which hopefully the users wont want or need to do very often. The Gnome Guidelines recommend against trying to have keybindings for everything, which is not a very helpful recommendation but am becoming more and more convinced that bindings should be reserved for actions that are likely to be repeated often. So I'd recommend against that approach.

Inkscape is probably the first Gnome Application I have ever seen that allows you to hide the menubar (i suppose Dia and the GIMP do too but in an entirely different way), the downside of which is that it is the first to face these problems. If there is a solution that we can agree on then Inkscape help forge the way forward and I'll submit it to be added to the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.

At the very least I'm hoping this option to shoot yourself in the foot be sorted out in some way before the next release.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/