spacefm and the global menu

I like using the SpaceFM file manager, but in Ubuntu 12.04's Unity, SpaceFM's menus don't show up in Unity's Global Menu (on the top panel) when the cursor hovers over the Global Menu area. They also don't show up where SpaceFM's menu bar would normally be:

That kinda cripples SpaceFM. The menus are supposed to show up on the Unity's top panel like they do here for gnome-terminal:

One work-around is to use the following to run SpaceFM:

$ UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= spacefm

Or, you can edit the "Exec" line in /usr/share/applications/spacefm.desktop. Here, the default was:

Exec=spacefm %F

I changed that to:

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= spacefm

That works nicely, but in researching this issue, I started wondering: Why bother with the Global Menu at all? There are a few different ways of getting rid of it. One solution I've seen:

$ sudo apt-get autoremove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt

After looking over man apt-get, I'm not totally sure why "autoremove" would be used in this command instead of "remove." I'd probably run the following instead:

$ sudo apt-get remove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt

Even after removing those packages, Firefox and Thunderbird's menus still show up in the Global Menu, as I understand, so you'd have to run the following for those apps:

$ sudo apt-get remove firefox-globalmenu thunderbird-globalmenu

More web searching turns up another command for getting rid of the Global Menu:

$ sudo apt-get remove indicator-appmenu

I like that one better, so that's what I used here. To get the Global Menu back, just run:

$ sudo apt-get install indicator-appmenu

Getting rid of the Global Menu puts the menus back on the application's menu bar, which is what most people are used to:

Removing indicator-appmenu also works for Firefox. For all maximized windows, the window control buttons (close, maximize, minimize) still show up on Unity's panel, but that's fine with me:

I don't hate Unity's Global Menu, but it can be irritating at times, so I'm kinda glad to be rid of it. There was supposed to be a GUI option for disabling it in Ubuntu 12.04, but I guess that didn't happen. In any case, it's gone from here, and I don't think I'll be missing it.