Fact you are using the term “from scratch”, as if this was something like a complex/lengthy procedure, seems to suggest you are using the menu in the wrong way: by opening it and closing with the mouse, instead of using the hotkey, which will to do unnecessary extra clicks, and will cause other issues as well, like missing all text messages and pop-up menus.
The menu should be opened (if it’s not already from the previous flight) with the mouse only when you first start GSX in a given session. From now on, you should always use the Hotkey to open/close it with the hotkey. You should close it from the Toolbar only when you are done with ground services, usually after pushback.
Now, the hotkey by default is CTRL+Shift+F12, and it’s like that only because we kept the same as the original GSX for FSX/P3D, because long time users might be accustomed to it, perhaps programmed keyboard/Joystick macros to use it.
But you can change it, and I always change it to be just X, which is way convenient because, in your case, if you wanted to “go back” to the gates menu, you would just press X twice (assuming you changed it to X, of course), and when the menu is closed/reopened using the hotkey, it reopens way more quickly, since it doesn’t have to reinitialize the whole html/javascript page, which is what happens if you close it entirely by pressing the Toolbar icon.
The reason why the GSX menu works like this, is because it’s a menu you need to open and close at different times, but it doesn’t need to stay open in the meantime, since you don’t get any benefit by keeping it open all the time (it’s not like a moving map, for example), and the reason why you shouldn’t use the Toolbar icon to close it if you are still using Ground Services, it’s because how the Toolbar systems work: the whole menu code stops to be called the moment you close the menu with the Toolbar, so it must restart “from scratch” again on the next reopening and won’t be able to “pop-up itself” or display messages because they require the menu Javascript code running, which it doesn’t when the Toolbar icon is not active ( dark icon ).
Yes, there are some add-ons using the Toolbar that circumvent this, by they are doing it in a very questionable way: by overriding the code for the stock MSFS Toolbar menu, which is something we’d rather not doing, since we don’t want to touch any of the original MSFS code, and having Javascript code always running in the background have some performance cost: that’s the main reason why Asobo changed the way the menus work back in SU5, which broke lots of add-ons that relied to the menu code always running.
This is of course explained in the GSX manual, where the proper usage of the menu is presented, with all the reasoning why it works in what might seem an “unusual” way, but it’s the only way that complies how the official, unmodified, MSFS toolbar menu works.
And it came with a nice side effect as well: because of the way the menus in MSFS work (completely different than FSX/P3D, were apps create their menu on the fly, in MSFS is the opposite: the menu calls into the app), we had to redesign the way GSX works entirely, and this resulted in GSX now being possibly remote controlled by 3rd party apps and integration, so it’s now possible to have apps controlling GSX “hands free” without even showing a menu, or possibly even more advanced things like airplane gauges showing the GSX menu inside their gauges/EFBs.
This very lengthy explanation, only to explain why you should always use the Hotkey to open or close the GSX menu, and if you changed the default Hotkey to be a single key, like X, “going back” the menu would basically means just pressing the hotkey twice, which is very fast, if you don’t have to go through the full menu restart.
Finally, your suggestion to use the 2nd Title bar as a “Back” function looks interesting, so we’ll take a look at it.
