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I have installed Chromium and Tweet Deck on it (trough Chrome Store), now I uninstalled Tweet Deck and after that Chromium, the problem is, when I installed Tweet Deck it asked me if I want to create a shortcut to it and I chose YES. Now that both are uninstalled the Tweet Deck icon still appears on Unity Menu over Internet.

enter image description here

I tried to remove the icon from the menu but I can't figure out how to do this. It should be a simple thing to do, but is giving me headaches :P

What I have to do to remove the shortcut and possible junk files from Chromium?

Also my Ubuntu version is 11.10 x64.

(Sorry if I write something wrong)

Hugo
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Removed
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7 Answers7

156

It seems that you can't remove apps from the Dash, however you can manage your launchers (*.desktop files) in one of the following directories:

  • /usr/share/applications
  • /usr/local/share/applications
  • ~/.local/share/applications

If your launcher file is in any of the first two directories, you will require root permissions to remove it.

Zignd
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Severo Raz
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    It was in ~/.local/share/applications. I successful removed it.

    Many tanks :D

     – Removed Oct 24 '11 at 02:31
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    It took me a bit, but I finally found more desktop files in /usr/share/app-install/desktop/ on Ubuntu 11.10 which is where the extra version of jEdit was showing up for me that was launching an old version that was duplicated in the unity menu. – kcstrom Mar 26 '12 at 20:57
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    Also if you delete a program installed with Wine you will have to look inside more than one folder inside the ~/.local/share/ diretory. – Zignd Apr 12 '13 at 12:16
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    That doesn't remove it from the Dash. Somehow a reindex still needs to happen. – Elijah Lynn Jun 08 '15 at 18:02
  • Make sure and check out @DolphinDream's answer about alacarte to manage these. I had a Chrome application launcher that was nowhere to be found in the above directories. https://askubuntu.com/a/454494/11929 – Elijah Lynn Apr 26 '17 at 20:54
  • Amazing boss, I got rid of unnecessary icons, Thanks. – Shubham Jun 04 '20 at 12:34
12

I use an application called alacarte (atalacarte is a program that for editing freedesktop.org complient menus). It allows you to remove the unwanted launchers from the menu or create/add new ones. I had to install this app myself (apt-get) in Ubuntu 12.04. IMO this app should be part of a default Ubuntu installation.

DolphinDream
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    alacarte rocks! Agree it should be part of a default Ubuntu installation... or be able to right click on icons in the launcher to edit/configure/remove them. – Elijah Lynn Apr 26 '17 at 20:53
2

I had the same trouble with deleting Firefox icon from Unity launcher. I installed two exemplars of Firefox: one with apt-get and one with dpkg from *.deb, so after removing both copies of Firefox, icon is still showed in Unity launcher.

Here is recipe that helped me:

Looking a package in dpkg

dpkg --list | grep firefox

result

ii firefox-mozilla-build:i386 35.0.1-0ubuntu1 Mozilla Firefox, official Mozilla build, packaged for Ubuntu by the Ubuntuzilla project.

Found! Well, when we know the name of the package, we can remove its remnants

sudo dpkg -r firefox-mozilla-build:i386

That's all, excess icon vanished from the launcher.

Pablo Bianchi
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Art B
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  • I installed Wine and then installed Photoscape.exe through Wine. Then after facing some problem in Photoscape I just uninstalled it using Wine uninstaller. But unfortunately the icons was present. Then I executed "dpkg --list | grep photoscape" and all icons related to Photoscape cleared. – Soumyadip Das Oct 28 '15 at 19:44
2

I had the same issue.

First I uninstalled the application, then I deleted all references from the following folder:

/usr/share/applications
/usr/local/share/applications
~/.local/share/applications

Rebooted....but never resolved my issue.

So installed this MENU editor:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caldas-lopes/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ezame

and delete unwanted icons.

pst007x
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1

Just now I had a similar problem with one app. The problem with the accepted answer is that desktop files can be stored in many other locations, not only those listed, like this one ~/.kde/share/apps/RecentDocuments/, for example.

So I can suggest to use the find utility in such a case. One needs to figure out what string is guaranteed to be a part of the name of a desktop file for the app in question and that string should be quite long in order to avoid too much output.

For instance ("iname" stands for case insensitive name, * is a wildcard, it means any character(s) in place of it):

sudo find / -iname '*tweet*'

Also one should try if necessary to search for some particular string in all desktop files on the system, like this:

sudo find / -name '*.desktop' -exec grep -i '*tweet*' {} +

Then remove all those found files and log off.

This should have helped the OP to remove those icons from the menu.

d.k
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0

Expanding on Severo Raz's answer :

  • /usr/share/applications
  • /usr/local/share/applications
  • ~/.local/share/applications

you can easily get it done using terminal, by :

  1. cd <directory>
  2. ls | grep <application_name("tweet")>

Which will give you an output like this : 

application_name.desktop

And then :

  1. rm application_name.desktop

Actually, you should be able to combine step 3+4 : 

ls | grep <appname> | xargs rm -f

Be warned : You may delete desktop icons which you not intended to remove due to naming similarities etc. ! No warranty.

Luatic
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-4

Right click the app's icon. On the next screen that appears, select the "Uninstall" button. The app should now be uninstalled.

Chris
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