Linux Mint Forums

I've recently updated my Linux Mint Mate to the most recent version 18.3 Sylvia and was, as usual, very much pleased with the improvements of the new version and with the overall system that I'm used to.

There is, however one change that is bothering me and which I cannot seem to go around.

The "Recent documents" Menu plugin was updated to include "Recently used apps" as well. While I find it useful to have such feature for recent documents, which require sometimes several clicks to reach, that is not the case for applications, which one keystroke (Super) and two or three letters suffice. Worse, by default the "Recently used applications" appears before "Recent documents" forcing one to dig through clicking here and there.
I couldn't find in the menu preferences anywhere to switch the "Recently used applications" tab off.
Is there anyway which I could disable it, while keeping the "Recent documents" plugin?

I checked the configuration options through the source code and there are none available to toggle the recently used applications tab without also toggling the recently used documents tab. They are together either on or off.

That said, by changing one number in one of the files of mintMenu you can make the Documents tab be the default tab. That sets the Documents tab as the current tab after each time you log in. (Mind that while it is running, mintMenu remembers the last displayed tab.)

To make this change run this command on the terminal or run dialog to start editing the file as root:
gksudo xed /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/plugins/recent.py
Find this line in the file (in current version it should be line 66 or so):
self.builder.get_object( "RecentTabs" ).set_current_page(0)
Change the "(0)" at the end to "(1"). Save the file. Log out and log back in to see it works.

If anything goes wrong, you can just reinstall the package mintmenu to restore this file to its original. That also means any time you get an update for the mintmenu package it will overwrite your change. That doesn't happen much between Linux Mint releases though.

xenopeek, thank you very much for your answer and for the time to look at the problem.

I tried it here, and your suggested workaround does work.
I understand why it will be overridden in updates and that it only changes the state of "Recently used" at log in, and that changes during the session will be remembered.
But it already does indeed behave better. Thank you.
I'm tagging this thread Solved, for it indeed seems that's what's possible within the current context.

Still, though small an issue, I think this might be worth reporting/feature requesting.
Where do you think it would be more appropriate to do so? For "Linux Mint" or for "Mate Desktop"?

mintMenu is developed by Linux Mint. You can make feature requests here: https://github.com/linuxmint/mintmenu/issues. You'll need to register an account on GitHub if you don't have one already. Registration is easy and requires but little information. They won't spam you.

xenopeek, one further thought. You mentioned that while mintMenu is running, it remembers the last displayed tab.
Do you happen to no where this "last displayed tab" is stored during the session?
Knowing that, perhaps a bash/loop + grep might be a possible approach to always open the document tab.

And thank you once again for the info on where to report.

Request done: https://github.com/linuxmint/mintmenu/issues/186

I tried some things but none of the plugins' functions gets called for opening/closing the menu. I can't easily find a hook where to set the Documents tab back to active. I considered removing the tab but that looked a lot more complex than I'm comfortable with

Perhaps somebody more familiar with Gtk programming can help out.

It's fine, your initial suggestion already made things much better.
Yet again, thank you!