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When I right-click on the Whisker Menu, the "Edit Applications" option is greyed out. Is there any way I can enable the option and edit the applications in Whisker Menu?

user18297
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1 Answers1

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MenuLibre is a menu editor that is used for the option in Whisker Menu.

In other words, the "Edit Applications" option is greyed out because no compatible menu editor is being installed to the system. You will have to install the menu editor separately.

sudo apt-get install menulibre

After the installation, the "Edit Applications" option is now enabled in Whisker Menu. There are several other ways to run the menu editor:

  • Open Whisker Menu, type "menu" in the search box and look for Menu Editor, or
  • Run menulibre in Application Launcher or Terminal, or
  • In Xfce, open Settings, type "menu" in the search box and look for Menu Editor

MenuLibre is independent of desktop environment in use, which means no additional dependencies. Therefore, users are less likely to notice if the dependent packages were installed as it is.

Why not by default: Apparently, MenuLibre and Whisker Menu are not related to each other in terms of their dependencies. Neither mentioned as 'suggested' nor 'recommended' packages.

Hence the reason why some users may encounter the said issue in the question. And no, it is not a dumb question. Just lack of explanations to end-users.

  • +1 because this is correct, but a heads up just in case readers experience problems. Supposedly, the Whisker menu is based on the freedesktop.org menu specification, as are MenuLibre and Alacarte (another menu editor). However, I ran into a situation with Whisker where MenuLibre and Alacarte produced different results, and neither worked properly with Whisker. My recollection is that Whisker was pulling menu details from locations different than the menu editors were storing it. I finally just switched to a different menu (actually a different desktop). – fixer1234 Aug 25 '17 at 19:07
  • If you end up with the original applications, you can try copying everything from `~/.local/share/applications/` (should be just `.desktop` files) into `/usr/share/applications/`, then deleting `~/.local/share/applications/`, if you want to make the changes system-wide. – Solomon Ucko Aug 19 '20 at 02:25