Wierd happenings with .config

[jonathanyc]

I was experimenting with adding new panels in XFCE when the panel manager crashed and I was left panel-less. To fix this, I deleted ~/.config/xfce4/panel, which was recreated and thus reset upon logging in again.

This behavior by itself was not unexpected, but when I later encountered another problem with the panel manager crashing, deleting the panel folder did not help. In fact, deleting the .config folder did not help, and it reset every single setting (obviously). Even the window title bars looked different now.

It gets even stranger. I decided to restore the deleted .config folder from the trash bin and found that while the panels remained the same (I had tried setting them back to what I wanted after I had deleted the .config folder and thus reset every setting) everything else was fixed - for example, the title bars were back to what came with the installation.

Does anyone know why I experienced this behavior? It seems very inconsistent, but I was hoping that a developer could shed some light on this.

Thanks!

[gapan]

When the panel crashed, you could have just run xfce4-panel from a terminal or from alt-F2 to get it back.

The default user settings are stored in /etc/skel. You can take the .config directory from in there and copy it to you homedir. That will restore everything to the default settings.

[jonathanyc]

Hello!
Well, I tried running xfce4-panel from the command line but I got a bunch of errors (which I unfortunately didn't copy down). I didn't try alt-F2, so I'll try that in the future.

Thanks for telling me about /etc/skel, I'll use that in the future too.