It would be a great advance if the software added the ribbon style menu (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), the wxWidgets library allows it, used in software such as RocketCake, Game Develop, adding the wxRibbon component along with wxCore and wxBase.
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Feel free to submit a wishlist item to GitLab. This may take a backseat to our AI-powered Clippy implementation, however. 
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It would be absolutetly horrible!
That UI belongs in the “Interface Hall of Shame” and is the reason I’ve rejected Microsoft completely and use Open Office, KiCAD and other open-source packages exclusively.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm
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Copying the Microsoft ribbon would be inviting a legal attack. There is a reason Libreoffice has not done this for a product intended to function in a compatible way to MS Office.
personally I hate the ribbon as the function i need has always gone missing.
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I doubt there would be any legal issue. In any case, libreoffice has had an optional ribbon-style interface for years.
https://books.libreoffice.org/en/CG74/CG7416-UserInterfaceVariants.html
I would love for someone to explain the advantage of the ribbon. My observation is that it takes up more space at the top of the wide screen monitor, and makes the working area closer to looking like a mail slot.
So many icons used in menus make me say “What the heck is that?” I would prefer words only. While it is true that I am pretty much a monolingual English speaker, I feel that I would rather have menus in German or Italian or other language that I do not otherwise know, rather than just the icons.
And while we are at it, I welcome any opportunity to hide menus that I never or seldom use, or park menu bars on the left or right side of the monitor rather than top or bottom.
My poster child for wasted monitor viewing area caused by the “ribbon” is Microsoft Styles which I never use, but in some Win applications I cannot customize so as to make those unused ribbon commands go away. If I remember correctly, I think that Bill Gates was no longer CEO when the new guy invoked the ribbons and Bill questioned the wisdom. If you want to accuse me of being totally lacking in style, so be it! Substance over style any day, and give me maximum monitor viewing area!
Yeah, OK: “Hide the ribbon”. That is an inconvenient option if I need a lot of those commands. Why not use a more space-efficient starting point?
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Agree.
I still have trouble accepting the “1 & 0” for “on and off” displayed on many power tool switches these days, especially when the “1 & 0” are displayed as a horizontal line and a zero.
The ribbon style menu was invented by Microsoft for its Office 2007 and is now used by all companies in the industrial sector, Autodesk, Siemens, Solidworks, Dassault Systèmes, Ansys, Bentley, Matworks, DownStream Technologies, etc…
If you ML9104, BobZ and all those who cry have a 1280 x 720 px monitor, the problem is you, not the interface design created by a team of graduates in User Experience.
This is Autocad on my 1440p monitor, The Ribbon Menu It doesn’t get in the way and allows me to see a large enough area to work comfortably, plus you can minimize the menu to have even more space.
The Ribbon Menu is not proportional, it always has the same height dimension regardless of the monitor resolution.
I recommend that you buy a 1440p monitor and it will solve the problem.
Also, the icons are easier to identify than your own name Bobz, the Ribbon Menu items is completly customizable.
If you boil it down, a ribbon is exactly the same as clicking a dropdown menu like “file” when right clicked, and a button when left clicked.
The only difference is that it has an icon, default task, and takes more space.
Kicads side menus are functionally the same.
Adding more functions to those and making it movable would achieve what you want without annoying the rest of us who don’t like the ribbon.
Microsoft seem committed to making things harder to find. No thanks.
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Maybe tie an ole oak tree to the ribbon and toss it overboard? 
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My monitor is 2K (1920 x 1080). I suppose that if I had space on my desk for a bigger monitor (and the right video from my laptop…I do not think I do…) then a 4K monitor might be a bit better. I think my monitor is 21" or so.
But regardless of the monitor size, I want to leave as much as possible for the workspace. The older menu styles seem to use less and are (if anything) easier to use.
I don’t think such an extremely radical alteration to Kicad would be a great idea. Hysteria would grip this forum, and the repercussions to the change would be felt world wide. Servers would overload; maybe the whole internet would shut down ( I remember the drama of the icon change in 6).
I doubt the owners, contributors or users would ever recover from the horror of this change.
@retiredfeline & @BobZ
Fortunately, I had nearly forgotten that song. It is a great shame I have been reminded.
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A 4k monitor would be better even if it was 21" as your current monitor . . . if you have good eyes or good glasses you will get more resolution and more real estate in pixels . . . and if you don’t want the extra pixels you can change the scaling and get less jagged lines instead.
Off-topic, but that resolution is 1k (aka FullHD). 2k is 1440p
I see how backward I am. I’ve never seen a menu like this, but I’m okay with it.
Fundamentally ribbon is bad because now you cannot see other options.
It takes the “most used” features and provides them in a convenient icon-based system so you can access it quicker as icongraphs do help (at the expense of useable screen area…).
The issue is those features you hardly know … Previously people would scroll through all he menus to find what they want. Now? It’s hidden behind other UI actions for additional popups and no way to know that THAT UI Element exposes the option you need without trying them all.
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If we take some version of 80/20 rule, it doesn’t make sense to fix a problem which doesn’t really exist for 80% of the user base. Ribbon was meant to meet certain needs among certain large group of users, and KiCad’s user base is very different, KiCad is not a general purpose “office” application with very wide variety of use cases or users. Ribbon was also meant to help with complexity of the user interface and the amount of functions in it. KiCad has less UI items and wouldn’t benefit much – if at all – from a ribbon. With a quick look the PCB editor may have 1/3 of the menu items compared with, say, LO Calc.
My personal opinion is that people actually may base their opinions on feelings instead of objective evaluation. One feeling, often unconscious, is that an application, its UI, looks “old fashioned” or “modern”. In itself it has nothing to do with usability, although it may be part of “UX”. Yes, KiCad UI comes mostly from Windows 95 era. So what? It works well.
In Open Source CAD world I’d guess FreeCAD would benefit much from a large UI overhaul, including ribbon, considering its workbenches etc. which make it even more complicated than a generic office application.
In my opinion there are mostly two problems with the complexity of KiCad UI: we need configurable toolbars, and context menus are overcrowded. The former has been recognized by the developers for a long time. The latter might benefit from some new idea, like having a context aware toolbar instead of everything in a long RMB menu. Also configurable context menus could be good.
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They added the ribbon to Mspaint.
It is now objectively more effort to get to what was once a single click on a button.
They made the simplest tool worse.
I’d argue the same for word etc, but mspaint can be easily tested side-by-side by anyone.
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It is so hard to resist replying to such a “perfect” statement: The problem is the user, not the “team of graduates in User experience…”
Maybe we should do a fund drive, so KiCad can hire Sweet Baby Inc…