The standard method for displaying or hiding the menu bar is to use these commands in gvim: * :set guioptions+=m enable (display) menu bar * :set guioptions-=m disable (hide) menu bar If you are using Gnome/Metacity, a problem may prevent the menu bar from being displayed: Gnome tries to dock the menu in a place where you cannot see it. A test to see if this is the issue is to open gvim as root (with sudo gvim), then see if the menu can be enabled and disabled using the above commands.