How can I restart the menu bar in Unity?

Question

My Unity menu bar is no longer working. Clicking on top-level menu items (on the right hand general menu items, or on the app-specific items on the left) registers visually, but menus don't drop down. (For example, clicking on the microphone icon causes the icon to flash, noting I clicked there, but the sound menu does not drop down).

How can I restart the menu bar without exiting Unity.

Solution

You can do this by restarting Unity:

• You can press Alt+F2, then type "unity", then click Enter to restart unity.

• Or you can run below command in terminal to restart Unity:

  setsid unity
  

Comments

[sevenseacat]

I have to do this all the time - do you know why the menu bar keeps stopping like this?

[Steve Kroon]

No idea; however, this hasn't happened to me in a while now, so if your system hasn't got all the updates installed, you might want to run an update.

[sevenseacat]

Yeah I've only seen it since upgrading to saucy, and I see it every couple of hours or so. Frustrating. Oh well, at least there's an easy fix.

[Steve Kroon]

Restarting unity will close all my open applications, right? I specifically just want to restart the menu bar. Or is this not possible?

[Radu Rădeanu]

No, restarting Unity will not affect any opened application.

[carbontax]

In practice I cannot remember this ever working. There has always been some underlying state that has caused the menu bar to disappear. Restarting unity does nothing to clear up the underlying issue, so I have to kill my login session anyway.

[Tgr]

This did close all the applications for me (in Ubuntu 16.04), except for the gnome-terminal windows for some reason...

[tlwhitec]

all my apps got closed on ubuntu 14.04

[matanster]

Worked cool for me. Chrome crashed during the process but all else seamlessly persevered.

[Steve Kroon]

My apps (except the terminal) also got closed on 16.04.