In Fullscreen, disable auto-hiding Mac menu bar

Question

(on latest Mavericks)

While in VirtualBox (Ubuntu) fullscreen, on a Mac host, each time the mouse goes near the top, the Mac auto-hide menu bar appears - and I want to prevent that, or at least, since it's the annoying component, reduce the time it takes to that menu to disappear when the mouse goes down [currently it's ~1 seconds].

Ideally the time needed to trigger that menu should be higher than currently [instant] - eg like keeping the mouse on top for 1 whole second.

Illustration below shows the Ubuntu menu that has been overridden by the Mac menu when the mouse hits the top of the screen.

There are already a few questions like this one that are either old or not answered.

Any progress in Maverics, near 2014?

Answer 1

So it seems someone found a working solution, at last.

First,

• close your VMs
• Quit VirtualBox

then as root (or sudo ...)

• copy the file somewhere as backup, then edit (eg vi) /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/Info.plist
• and add the line shown in the middle

the line <key>LSUIElement</key> <string>1</string> to be inserted between LSCanProvideIMVideoDataSource and NSHighResolutionCapable

<key>LSCanProvideIMVideoDataSource</key>    <true/>
<key>LSUIElement</key> <string>1</string>
<key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>          <true/>

save, then start VirtualBox again (I didn't have to log out/reboot).

The VM will not show anymore among the opened apps icons, but you can double click the VM in the VirtualBox to switch to it.

The whole post by Maestro is here.

Answer 2

From the parallels forum, but could be a goer?

If you don't want the dock or menu to show up in Mac OS X full screen then you need to turn on active screen corners and then set the screen corners to not have any associated action.

(From the menu select "Virtual Machine" > "Configure...". Then select "Options" from the toolbar and then "Full Screen" from the list on the left side of the window. Check "Active Screen Corners" and select "-" for each screen corner.)

Parallels Forum - Answer #4