Fixing up MX Linux application menu entries

Last week I did something that messed up the entries in the application menu.  I had the full menu duplicated four times and I don't know what I did to make the duplicates.  I looked at the Update Menu option, but, it didn't remove the duplicate entries.

I use MX Linux for the machine now as I want every Linux box in the house to use one distro to make my work easier having only one distro.  I originally had the netbook and my main box with ANTIX, the wife's machine with MINT and the media tower with PCLINUXOS.  They are all great distros, but, I had to pick one and MX worked on all machines right from the start (One wouldn't boot, another wouldn't recognize the hardware in the netbook and the other had minor issues with the video).

When I started to research what happened to the menu I went through the forums and the only thing I could see is that I can manually edit the menu applications file.

If you have to manually modify this file here are a few important things to keep in mind:

1. Everything you do will have to be as root.
2. Make a backup of the file before you touch it.
3. Take it slow, don't rush what you are doing.

You can find your application menu in /usr/share/desktop-menu/.icewm.  Use what ever file manager you are comfortable with.

Folder with icewm application menu

As you can see I made a backup of the file before editing.  I then edited the file as root.

Edit as root

Once in edit mode I manually removed the duplicated entries.  It took me a couple of updates as there were entries in what I selected that were not installed (my fault there as I picked the wrong duplicated group to remove).  Once you save the file the application menu is immediately updated.

Manually editing the application menu

As you can see the menu appears and I don't have the duplicated menu entries any more.

MX Application Menu

The preferable way is to let the system do the work for you updating the menus, but, if something does get messed up you do have a way to manually edit the menu entries.

Update 2019/08/31
Looks like MX 18 has changed things around and the above won't work.  I have to figure it out and record how to manually do this.  I prefer one spot and one format and old school text editors to make changes like this. It does have MX MENU EDITOR, but, again I prefer a simple text editor to add/change/delete.