I want all my menu bars back

Support & Help Requests
1

All the pre-installed, 'native MATE', programs have suddenly lost their menu bars. And so have some, maybe all, of the programs I've installed.

The other day I had been using EoM and a little later when I went to use it again it opened with no menu bar. I thought it was a problem with EoM and spent an awful lot of time trying to attack the problem with that idea in mind. Eventually noticed the menu bar was missing as well in Pluma which lead me to find that the menu bars were missing on all MATE's programs and at least a couple I'd installed. Makes them very difficult, some nearly impossible, to use.

Currently I'm thinking that somewhere there must be a configuration option that some how got changed. I can't figure how as between the two above mentioned uses of EoM, the only thing I can remember doing is trying some changes to Panel and Plank.

For all my searching and reading and poking around my system, I can't find anything that even hints at what the problem might be. But I still suspect it will turn out to be something simple, maybe even obvious.

In the mean time, what am I to do?

2

Welcome Basil.

You might want to install Geany.

I feel it is more useful text editor than Pluma. (No putdown on Pluma)

It also has more features like the ability to run scripts etc.

3

When you click in the window of a running program to give it the focus, does its menu by any chance appear on your top panel? (Look closely.) If so, perhaps when you were experimenting with panels and Plank you tried the Cupertino layout, which moves application menus to a global menu on the top panel.

If that is what happened, you should be able to right-click the global menu and select Remove from Panel. Or you could use MATE Tweak to select a different panel layout.

5 Likes
4

If you do a right-click inside the application window, do you get a pop-up menu?

If so, does it offer a "Show Menubar" option?

5

Pluma is a text editor. I think you're thinking of Caja.

6

Sorry about that Chief. I changed my post.

7

Hi, @Basil. Just checking. Did you resolve your problem?

1 Like
8

Yeah, sorry, I got called away from this problem for a few days, haven't even had time to check my e-mail.

So I've spent the evening considering your suggestions, all to no avail. And I went back through all the various panels and docks looking for something I know not what. The only panels I was ever interested in were Contemporary and Familiar, and I can see no difference between the two. Well in my frustration I thought that maybe I don't even need panels. I thought maybe I could just get by with keyboard shortcuts. As a distraction from my woes I decided to give it a try. Well it seems you can't delete that last panel, so I made it minimal, only Brisk Menu Launcher, Force Quit, Clock/Calender and Show Desktop.

Anyway, eventually back to my problem and then on to return to this forum. So EoM is almost always open in one corner of at least one workspace. And so it has been all the time I've been working on this problem. Gotta keep an eye out for any change. Just a minute ago as I was typing this I thought of something different I'd noticed about EoM compared to some, maybe all of the other programs that also lost their menu bars which caused me to glance over at EoM sitting in the corner. The menu bars are back, and on, . . . it looks like, all the other programs. I had checked it just before I started writing this. I'm at a loss.

Except for opening a text file and, obviously opening my e-mail account, I've done nothing this evening to or with my computer but play around with panels. None of which seemed to make any difference and then at some point, in a matter of a few minutes, during my typing, something changed.

Right now this all feels so unreal. It seems there's nothing left to do but thank everyone that took the time to make a suggestion.

Well, in case you're curious, the thing I'd notice about EoM was that if you right clicked on the toolbar an option opened that allowed additions to it. So with that I was able to open a file and start a slideshow which returned a little functionality. But nothing to do with the problem. And none of the other programs I checked allowed for this option.

So thanks again. Problem solved, . . . but unsolved. Until the next mystery.

1 Like
9

The 'Contemporary' layout is configured to use the global menu, the 'Familiar' is not.

See the screenshots:

contemporary
contemporary559×200 14.3 KB

familiar
familiar559×200 13.2 KB

What you encountered was not a mystery, just some bug with your global menu. When you switched back to the 'Familiar' layout, the menus returned back to their place. That's what @DaveHighland was trying to explain to you using the 'Cupertino' layout as an example.

4 Likes
10

You're probably right on all accounts. There seems to be a bug somewhere. I had not noticed the difference between Contemporary and Familiar when I initially ran through all the panel options which now leads me to suspect that at that time the switches between panels was working correctly as I still had my menu bars. It was maybe 10 minutes later when the menu bars disappeared and my ensuing struggles led to my first posting. I did take DaveHighland to heart, even though I'd again just gone thru all the panels. So l went through the panels again(at least a couple of times) looking as he suggested for that global menu on the top panel. No luck. I then went back to Familiar as I was thinking that's MATE's native panel, still no menu bars. So as I said in my 2nd post, it was some time later while typing that 2nd post that suddenly the menu bars were back.

So a bug? A delayed reset? I don't know enough about this stuff to figure that out. I don't have the time to be trying to reproduce the problem. For now I'm just leaving the panel alone. I'm currently using(barely using) a single, very minimal, Familiar panel, only a couple items on it. I've been experimenting with operating only with keyboard short cuts and it's going a lot better than I ever would have thought. I'm almost to the point of going panel less, assuming that final panel can be deleted.

Anyway, I'm happy to have my menu bars back and thank you very much for your time and trouble.

4 Likes