I was noticing that in the applications menu, when I clicked on a "pre-installed" kali tool, it would not open and I would have to open it from the command line.

I ran the following commands to try and reinstall the kali menu

apt-get remove --purge kali-menu && apt-get clean
rm -rf .local/share/applications
rm -rf .config/menus
apt-get install kali-menu -y

This did not work, and now the custom "Useful Applications" menu is gone, along with my "Recently Used" menu. I believe all of the applications are still installed, as I am able to reach them from the terminal.

Naturally, the .local/share/applications is gone along with the .config/menus. I thought they would return after reinstalling kali-menu, but they did not. I believe this to be the likely issue.

How should I go about getting back my Useful Applications/Recently Used menus? Preferably these menus would also work (click the icon, tool opens.)