WildMenus Coolness...

Michael Hanni wrote an awesome little do-dad for GNUstep called WildMenus.

What it does is it changes the "side-of-the-screen" menus in GNUstep applications to instead put the menu along the top of the screen like it's done on the Mac. Incredibly, it does this by using a set of Objective-C categories that are loaded by the NSApplication "User Bundle" loader - so it's a really nice use of Objective-C dynamism to do something really slick.

There were a few things that kinda bugged me about how it worked however - specifically, when you selected an item, the menu did not close automatically... (this is the way GNUstep menus normally work) - as well, it used the Application icon in the upper left corner rather than a consistent user provided icon (arguably a good feature, but I'm such an Apple fanboy that I wanted to have it look like OS X. Finally, to REALLY make it look OSXish... I felt it needed little curved corners like OSX has...

Figure: Original GNUstep Menus

Figure: My WildMenus

Yep, what you see above is running on Linux using GNUstep, and the KDE window manager. No, I will not give you the Apple Icon. Do not ask.

The code to do some of this was not really pretty - and I bet someone else could probably improve it - but it works, and it's a fun hack... soooo I present to you...

My modified version of WildMenus