Getting your REAPER toolbar back

Symptom: after installing — or after uninstalling — the toolbar at the top of REAPER shows only the Virtue button, or nothing at all, and the buttons that were there before are gone.

Fixed, on both platforms

This was our bug, in two forms. Installing no longer replaces your toolbar, and uninstalling no longer empties it. As of 1.2.2 the installer also copies your toolbar file before it touches it, and rebuilds a flattened toolbar from that copy — your own buttons, not a default set.

The backup starts at 1.2.2. A machine that was already flattened by an earlier version has no copy to read from, so it gets REAPER’s default buttons instead. That gives you a toolbar rather than your toolbar, and it is the best that can be done after the fact.

What went wrong when installing

REAPER keeps toolbar layouts in reaper-menu.ini. When that file has no [Main toolbar] section, REAPER draws the default toolbar that comes with your theme. The moment the section exists, it is the toolbar — REAPER shows exactly what is listed there and nothing else.

The installer added its button by creating that section. On a machine that had never customised its toolbar there was no section yet, so it created one containing a single entry: the Virtue button. That silently replaced the whole default toolbar.

The installer now writes REAPER’s own default buttons and adds Virtue after them, so nothing is displaced — on both macOS and Windows. A toolbar you had already customised was never touched; that path always appended correctly.

What went wrong when uninstalling

Different bug, same file, and this one could take a toolbar you had built yourself.

REAPER reads item_0, item_1, item_2 and so on, and stops at the first index that is missing. The uninstaller deleted its own item_N= line outright. If you had left the Virtue button at the end of the strip you never noticed; if you had dragged it towards the front, everything after it stopped being drawn. Reinstalling did not help either, because the new button was appended past the gap and REAPER never read that far.

The uninstaller now blanks the slot instead of deleting it, so the numbering stays unbroken. One unused separator is the whole cost. Installing also closes a gap it finds in an existing toolbar, so a toolbar already damaged this way is repaired.

Restoring your own toolbar from a backup

If you were on 1.2.2 or later when the toolbar changed, there is an exact copy of your file on disk. See Your toolbar backups for where it is and how to put it back — the short version is quit REAPER first, copy the file over, start REAPER again.

Restoring the default toolbar

Tip

Use this when there is no backup to restore — a machine flattened before 1.2.2, or a toolbar you would rather start over on.

The quickest route, inside REAPER:

1. Right-click an empty part of the toolbar → Customize toolbar…
2. Check that Main toolbar is the one selected at the top.
3. Click Reset… and choose to reset it to the default.
4. Close the dialog.

Your default buttons come back. Re-adding Virtue afterwards is optional — see below.

Caution

If you had customised the toolbar before installing, reset it to the default, then add your own buttons back. Anything you had is still available in the action list.

Putting the Virtue button back

If you want the button and it is no longer there:

1. Right-click the toolbar → Customize toolbar…
2. Add…, then search the action list for Virtue: Show FX Manager.
3. Add it, and optionally set its icon to toolbar_virtue.png.

If you would rather not have it at all

VFxM does not need a toolbar button. It is always reachable from Extensions → Virtue FX Manager, and from the action list — where you can give it any keyboard shortcut you like. Removing the button from the toolbar does not affect the extension.