The global menu

In Singularity, an app’s menus do not sit on top of the window. They live in the center of the panel. This is the global menu.

How it behaves

When you focus an app, its menus appear in the panel. Switch to another app and the menus follow your focus. When the focused app has no menus, the area stays empty rather than carrying clutter. The result is that every window stays clean: the menu chrome lives in one predictable place instead of being repeated on each window.

It works for more than native apps

Singularity’s own apps put their full menus in the panel because they are built for it. But the desktop also works hard to show menus for apps that were not: it understands the menus modern GTK apps export, the app menus older apps register, and as a last resort it can even read an app’s menu through the accessibility layer. So most apps you run will have a menu in the panel, whether or not they were made with Singularity in mind. The exact mechanisms are covered in How the global menu works.

When there is no menu

If an app exposes nothing at all, the panel still gives you something useful: the app’s own launcher actions and basic window controls. And when you are on the desktop itself, with no app focused, the menu becomes a small system menu, with about, settings, lock, log out, and shut down.