KDE/Qt apps without menubar when started from a shell

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

I've noticed under 10.9(.4) that a number of Qt and KDE applications do not show their global/toplevel menubar when started from the commandline instead of through LaunchServices. Or you have to cycle to and from another application in order for the menubar to appear. xxdiff is one of them, as is Ark.
This reminds me a bit of the time where applications had to live in an app bundle to be able to connect to the window manager, but I thought that was no longer the case. In any case, I certainly didn't notice anything like this when running 10.6.8 ...

Any idea what causes this?

Thanks,
R.