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(Note: I've looked at Can I change the image of the icons on my taskbar?, but either I'm too dumb to understand the answers there, or they doesn't address my problem anyway.)

I just installed searchmonkey on Mint 20.04. Everything looks fine except when it's running (or permanently, if I select "Add to Panel" from the Cinnamon Main Menu) the taskbar icon is blank.

More precisely, the icon is black, and since the rest of my taskbar is black anyway, that makes it invisible (until I move the cursor over it, when it helpfully "highlights" itself by turning grey so at least I know it's there! :)

enter image description here

I'm not very wise in the ways of Linux, so if there's a solution to my problem, please can it be really easy for me to implement!

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  • I don't know how it works in Cinnamon but in Linux 20 MATE (when program is added to panel) I can right-click on this icon and it shows context menu and I can select "Properties" which show windows with settings - ie. command and icon - and I can click on icon to change it.
    – furas
    Commented Dec 31, 2020 at 13:44
  • BTW: do you see icon for this program in main menu ? On MATE I can change icon also in menu using right-click
    – furas
    Commented Dec 31, 2020 at 13:47
  • I don't know how to take a screenshot of the main menu, but now you mention it, I see that unlike all other programs, there's no icon in the menu either. I don't recall doing anything unusual when I selected & installed searchmonkey using Administration -> Software Manager. But it didn't take long, so I'll try uninstalling and reinstalling it to see if anything changes
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 31, 2020 at 14:13
  • ...well, that made no difference! Not surprising, I guess - after uninstall + reinstall, the "born again" instance of the program still remembered the search paths I'd been using earlier, so I suppose it also "remembered" not to show an icon! :)
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 31, 2020 at 14:19
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    Like I said, "I'm not very wise in the ways of Linux". But I've just spent the past hour or more worrying at this, and finally figured out something that's good enough for me.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Dec 31, 2020 at 17:52

3 Answers 3

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FumbleFingers, you are a genius!! ThankyouThankyouThankyou!!

I had a couple icons not showing up (searchmonkey and zoho notebook) and one that had reverted to an old (ugly) generic image (KDE BasKet, which I do use on my gnome desktop).

To help any Linux noobs out, here's exactly how I did it. (N.B., I am NOT a Linux maven.) For any real noobs reading this, you will need sudo permissions to edit or save some of these files. I will try to be specific.

  1. Take a screenshot of the image you want to use and save normally (Downloads,Desktop, Pictures, whatever). Gussy it up with a retouch app if you choose (GIMP, etc.)
  2. Open nemo with root permissions. (Ctrl-Alt-t opens a terminal and you type 'sudo nemo' without the quote marks.) Use F3 for dual pane mode to make it easier to drag and drop. If you are using a different file manager, type its name instead of nemo.
  3. In the left pane go to where your image is stored (e.g., Desktop, if that's where you saved it) and in the right pane go to /usr/share/pixmaps/ and then drag the image from the left pane to the right pane so that it is now /usr/share/pixmaps/YourNewImageFile.png (or whatever image name and type you saved it as). If you can't figure out how to get a dual pane for drag-and-drop in your file browser, right click on the file, select 'move' and then select the destination.
  4. Close the terminal and nemo and open another terminal.
  5. Type 'sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/NameOfApplication' You can find the name of the application by going to /usr/share/applications in your file manager and looking for its exact spelling. Capital letters vs non-capitals are important. If you don't have gedit installed, use whatever text editor you have or download gedit with your software manager.
  6. Find the 'Icon=' line and change whatever comes after the = mark to '/usr/share/pixmaps/YourNewImageFile.png (again, the image name must be exactly as you named it). If you think you might ever want to change this back to the original, put a hash mark plus space in front of the 'Icon=whatevertext' line so that it becomes '# Icon=whatevevertext' and add a new 'Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/YourNewImageFile' line. To change it back, you just remove the hashmark plus space and remove the line you added.
  7. Save the file. In gedit, there is a little button at the top, near the right side that says [save]. If you did not open gedit as root (i.e., 'sudo gedit') you will not be able to use that button. You must have root privilege to save the file.
  8. As soon as you close gedit, your icons should appear. If they don't you have either misspelled something (e.g., capital letter vs no-cap) or made a mistake in typing the path.
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    Looks like me and you are the only people who have problems like this (or at least, we're the only people who thought our "solutions" were sufficiently "non-intuitive" to be worth writing down. Anyway, at least someone else has contributed to this page now, so there's something I can upvote. But in the circumstances, I hope you won't be miffed if I don't actually accept (someone who knows more than both of us put together might contribute something better one day! :)
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 13:05
  • I suspect by the number of views that this question and your answer have helped a lot more people than just me. If I could figure out how to upvote your post, I would do so. I just happened onto this site looking for an answer to the disappearing icons. I have registered, but still don't see any upvote buttons.
    – Ralph
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 13:33
  • It's a long time ago for me, but I think there are some pretty major limitations on what you can do on Stack Exchange sites at first (can't vote, can't comment everywhere, etc.). Things get a lot better once you acquire 50 "reputation points" (you've already got 11 points from you making this post and me upvoting it), so my advice is to stick with it. In the circumstances, I'll "accept" your answer, which gives you another 15 rep points - I might feasibly switch my acceptance to another more "knowledgeable" answer in future (some hope! :), but by then you might be raking in more points anyway!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 15:01
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I don't really know what I'm doing here, so maybe this isn't a good method. But so far it's working for me...

Using the Mint file manager nemo, I searched for "searchmonkey" (a real "meta" search, I thought! :)

I found the folder /usr/share/applications, where I noticed that all the other files had meaningful icons, but "searchmonkey" didn't.

I also found a file called searchmonkey-300x300.png in /usr/share/pixmaps/searchmonkey/, that I could display (in Xviewer) by double-clicking on it in the nemo list of results for my search above. It looked like a good enough image to me, so I opened a terminal and entered...

sudo nemo /usr/share/applications

...then I right-clicked the icon-less searchmonkey file, selected Open with Text Editor, and found the line...

Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/searchmonkey/searchmonkey-32x32.png

...which I changed to...

Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/searchmonkey/searchmonkey-300x300.png

Finally I saved the file as edited above and rebooted. And like the guy falling off the skyscraper said as he passed each floor, So far so good!

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  • A year further down the track, having just done a complete reinstall of Linux Mint, Google helpfully presented me with a link to this very page when I searched for searchmonkey icon invisible. Nothing to think about this time - I just copied & pasted a couple of lines from my own answer here, and I'm done & dusted!
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jan 31, 2022 at 12:39
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It seems the issue is searchmonkey.xpm is not ok with ubuntu. I converted this file to a PNG, copied it back in the pixmaps folder and pointed searchmonkey.desktop at it, and it shows up now on the favorites.

I can't remember what it was pointing at initially, I've been fiddling with it so much. I think pointing at searchmonkey.png, but this is a link file. It makes sense if this is the cause. To delete the link file, in terminal in pixmaps:

sudo rm searchmonkey.png

To get the replacement in the folder, if the replacement is at /home/computer/:

sudo cp /home/computer/searchmonkey.png /usr/share/pixmaps/searchmonkey.png
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  • I'm older and (slightly! :) wiser than when I first raised this issue. I now realise that if I run ls -l /usr/share/pixmaps/searchmonkey at the command line, the only two relevant files in that folder are searchmonkey-300x300.png and searchmonkey.png. There is no file called searchmonkey-32x32.png in that folder. So all I'm doing is editing the /usr/share/applications "application launch control" file to reference a file that does exist. Your solution requires finding a file called searchmonkey-32x32.png from somewhere on the Internet and copying it to "home".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 16, 2023 at 19:13

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