Accidentally deleted menu items...need help!

[Andy06]

So I uh...was using the main menu editor tool under System>preferences>Main Menu

And umm....on the left there is the option to untick boxes to hide them, but since there is a Revert to default button on the bottom, I instead selected lots of items from the right side and hit "Delete" instead and whoosh, they disappeared.

So obviously I hit the revert button and it dint.....revert, it just unhides the things that are currently there but does not bring back what was deleted.
So logically..........I deleted some more entries to test my theory and yeah......it doesn't bring them back.

What do I do now? I have only half a System>administration menu
And yea I just had to test it on the important administration section, I just could not test it in an innocuous menu like the Places or Apps one. My IQ reading for today is probably not in 3 figures.

Thanks

[Amilo1718]

you might try

alacarte

using the CLI

[MasterProg]

Try "Revert" button in Alacarte. If it doesn't work try this:

As far as I know, when you delete an item from menu, it is not actually deleted - they are just marked as hidden.

Go to ~/.local/share/applications, edit every file with .desktop extension, find the line Hidden=true and replace true with false.

You can use this command to find out which items are hidden:

cd ~/.local/share/applications
grep -l "Hidden=true" *.desktop

There should definitely be a program that would do that automatically, can't think of one, though.

Hope that helps.

[Andy06]

Amilo1718,

alacarte is the same as the main menu editor I used to cause the whole mess in the first place hehe. It does not allow you to restore you pristine menu configuration. The revert button is a lying, misleading and nefarious sham

As far as I know, when you delete an item from menu, it is not actually deleted - they are just marked as hidden.

Go to ~/.local/share/applications, edit every file with .desktop extension, find the line Hidden=true and replace true with false.

You can use this command to find out which items are hidden:

Masterprog,

Does this work for only one menu section/subsection or does it work for items deleted from the apps, places as well as system prefs and system admin menu?

I also have a new question. alacarte is the app named as menu editor in the system>preferences menu right?
Then what is this thing called "menu editor" in the add/remove programs. Its not alacarte since alacarte is listed separately in Synaptic and this "menu editor" in add/remove is listed as gnome-menus in synaptic.

Thanks

[ajgreeny]

Try renaming your ~/.gconf/apps/panel folder to see if that gets rid of the configuration you have mistakenly set up.

[MasterProg]

It works for all deleted items, in System Preferences and Administration menus as well. I don't know if it works for Places menu - I have never tried to alter it in any way.

[Andy06]

ajgreeny,

Try renaming your ~/.gconf/apps/panel folder to see if that gets rid of the configuration you have mistakenly set up.

That dint quite work. It reset the panel settings and everything about the panels but it did not restore the menus. Oh well, at least now I know what to do when I screw up the panel

But I think you had the right idea, if deleting/renaming the whole panels part restores panels to default. Is there a separate settings folder for Menus which I could rename, perhaps that would restore the menus configuration. Also about those packages I mentioned earlier, would removing and reinstalling the menu package help?

Thanks a lot.

P.S Just in case someone has these problem in the future and is referring to this thread, a real gem is the GNOME DO app, sure you can't see any of the deleted items in the menu, but you at least don't lose easy access to them as long as you have GNOME DO installed.

[Andy06]

Ok the problem just got more absurd.
The alacarte (system>preferences>main menu) just stopped working.

I can execute it when I sudo it, otherwise it doesn't run when I click on it.

Typing alacarte into the terminal brings up this error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 36, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/alacarte", line 32, in main
    app = MainWindow(datadir, version, sys.argv)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Alacarte/MainWindow.py", line 50, in __init__
    self.editor = MenuEditor()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 36, in __init__
    self.__loadMenus()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 59, in __loadMenus
    self.save(True)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/Alacarte/MenuEditor.py", line 63, in save
    fd = open(getattr(self, menu).path, 'w')
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/Raptor/.config/menus/applications.menu'

Is this because I messed with the gconf/apps/panel folder and those .desktop files?

Thanks

[james.brantley]

So I uh...was using the main menu editor tool under System>preferences>Main Menu

And umm....on the left there is the option to untick boxes to hide them, but since there is a Revert to default button on the bottom, I instead selected lots of items from the right side and hit "Delete" instead and whoosh, they disappeared.

So obviously I hit the revert button and it dint.....revert, it just unhides the things that are currently there but does not bring back what was deleted.
So logically..........I deleted some more entries to test my theory and yeah......it doesn't bring them back.

What do I do now? I have only half a System>administration menu
And yea I just had to test it on the important administration section, I just could not test it in an innocuous menu like the Places or Apps one. My IQ reading for today is probably not in 3 figures.

Thanks

Hello, you might try right clicking on the panel then select "add to panel" scroll down till you find "main menu" select it and then it will place itself on the panel after that right click on your partial menu then select "remove from panel" and you will be left with the full main menu that you placed there. Hop this helps!

[Andy06]

No that does not work. The configuration of the new menu is exactly the same as that of the old menu. Even if I delete the old menu first and THEN add the new one, it comes back with the same config. Maybe if I can somehow delete the configuration folder like ajgreeny recommended for the panel (Now where would that be for the menus?)