Wandering electrons... but not too far

This tips and tricks was written for the 9.2x versions; things may be different in 9.5! (I'll test as soon as I can)

In my post "Another thing I like about Opera: its logical layout" I said that I would like to see a menu bar that's hidden by default (but easily displayed by a simple keyboard shortcut) à la IE7.

But what I said was incorrect; you can indeed hide the Opera menu bar to gain even more screen space. It's even pretty darn easy! Here's how...


But first, a precautionary tale

I found out about this via the Opera Wiki custom buttons page. There, under the heading "Menu Buttons" you will find a choice of buttons that you can drag and drop to a toolbar; clicking on the button will make the contents of the menu bar disappear and reappear. I was hugely excited by this... but then I closed and restarted Opera and-oh the horror of it all-my menu bar was gone, but so was the button to bring it back!

If anybody out there knows why this happened do let me know (compatability problems with 9.21?).

So backpedal, backpedal I managed to get my Opera reworking.

(EDIT: I did manage to get the menu buttons working in my browser later on and they're pretty neat too! If, when trying to install a menu button and you run into problems, type "opera:config" into your address field and hit enter; this opens the Preferences editor. Next search the word "Menu" in the quick find box. You'll see an item entitled "Show menu". Check its box and the click "Save" and "ok" in the confirmation dialog. Restart Opera, and you should have the default menu back in place)

Second, how to do it with even more elegance

Nevertheless on the Opera wiki page, they mention that you can map a keyboard shortcut to "Enable menu bar | Disable menu bar".

Not wanting to give up the good fight I decided to try a keyboard shortcut, which, in my opinion is a much more elegant way to achieve this; after all, being a minimalist and all, adding another button is to be avoided in theory.

So I went to Tamil's excellent how-to on modifying and adding keyboard shortcuts, and suggest that you do the same. Tamil suggest in another post to replace the alt-F11 shortcut for the Unix Platform, but I decided to create a new shortcut assigned to "alt m".

And-oh the joy of it all-it works perfectly!

It's there:


ALT-m, it's not there:


Re-Alt-m, it's there again:


I'll let you follow Tamil's great instructions, just one clarification: when you type in the shortcut, you need to type first the 'm' then TYPE IN 'Alt' (you can't just press the alt key). you'll next tab over to the command and type in 'Enable menu bar | Disable menu bar' (no apostrophes of course). The program will suggest the command as you go along but you can just keep on typing as well, you're choice.

Opera, Lovin' it more and more everyday.