My wife is having dinner with the baby at her parents’, so I took a moment to do a bit of pure, pointless, fun hacking after reading a discussion of which emacs gui features to turn off on a site I frequent. I turn off the tool bar and the scroll bar to get as much screen real estate as possible, but leave the menu bar on, because it doesn’t take up that much space, and I occasionally use it to grab some little used feature whose full function name I don’t recall.

My idea: make the menu bar appear only if the mouse is in that general vicinity. This initial implementation is hacky and doesn’t work quite right; but it shouldn’t take much to make it work. It’s probably actually already been done somewhere, but it was fun to hack up something for the sake of hacking… something I don’t get enough time for these days.

    (defun menu-bar-show-hide-helper ()
      (if (< (cddr (mouse-pixel-position)) 20)
      (menu-bar-mode 1)
    (menu-bar-mode 0)))

    (defun menu-bar-show-hide ()
      (run-with-idle-timer 0.1 t 'menu-bar-show-hide-helper))

I’ll add fixes and updates as they are sent in.