<solved> Cinnamon 17 menu glitch with GoldenDict

[sadhu]

The LM 17-64 cinnamon menu appears to have a bug, at least for the GoldenDict application.

I just installed goldendict using synaptic. The app disappeared from the menu when I tried to cut/paste it to a different category using the menu editor. I then did sudo apt-get remove goldendict, followed by sudo apt-get install goldendict, figuring that that would be the quickest way to get the item back into the menu. No luck.

I manually created an entry, manually selecting an icon. That worked just fine. But when I entered "gol" in the menu search box, I get entries for both the app and for its icon.

I edited the GoldenDict menu item again, this time choosing a scalable svg for the icon. Now the search has links to the app and TWO graphic icons. See attachment 08-23-26.png.

When i press <PrintScreen>, the display is redrawn, this time showing the GoldenDict app, as well as what appears to be "Recent Files". See attachment 0-33-29.png. This behaviour --- showing recent files --- happens all the time, even when nothing is typed into the search box. Note that if the menu is completely full, the recent files are at the bottom of the list, so they don't seem to appear.

a. What's going on with the Goldendict menu item? -- and
b. Is this recent files business a bug or a feature?

-Sadhu

[sadhu]

I did two things and the problem went away.

1. unchecked the "Show recent" box in the menu editor
2. Opened a terminal in ~/.local,
   • then deleted recently-used.xbel,
     then created a directory entitled 'recently-used.xbel',
     then set the directory permissions to read-only
     then changed the owner of that directory to root:root.

Of course, #2 means I get no recent files ever ever ever, which is what i want. (Well, komodo-edit, libreoffice, etc. maintain their own recent-files lists, which is OK by me.)

--Sadhu