GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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Tear-Off Menus

r0.2

Gnome applications have tearable menus. That's tearable menus, not terrible menus--menus that can be torn off and come up in a floating window of their own, and thus persist until you want to remove them. The menus that are tearable have an extra, and often overlooked, menu item: it is the first item in the menu and consists of a sequence of dashes. For example the figure on the right shows the bluefish HTML editor's File menu after it has been torn off. Tear-off menus are useful to access common menu functions quickly. The original menu is still accessible.

The menu can be removed by either selecting the first item again (the dashed menu item with the leading arrow) if it exists, or else simply by closing the window in the usual manner (usually the window's rightmost button).

Such tear-off menus are useful but their state is not recorded by the system so that next time you start up an application for which you have torn-off menus this fact is lost and you will need to tear them off again.