How do I remove the video lens?

How do I remove the video lens in Unity 12.04?

Solution 1:

Its relatively straightforward to remove the video lens.

From a terminal:

sudo apt-get purge unity-lens-video

Alternatively, from the software center just search for unity-lens-video, click remove and click Remove All when prompted.

Finally - logout and login.

Solution 2:

As it turns out, I turned the renaming lense folders into a small project that I made into a PPA. It's located here if you want to try it out. You have to log-out and log-in after you apply the changes.

It works fine for me. Leaving the rest of the answer for historical purposes.

Interesting question I wondered about, but never asked.

Substitute video or any other lense name to disable other lenses.

Lenses are stored in /usr/share/unity/lenses/

So cd /usr/share/unity/lenses/. Step in to the directory of the lense you want to disable. I wanted to disable files cd files.
I renamed files.lens like so sudo mv files.lense files.lense.ignore
And replaced unity unity --replace &

Works for me with no crashes.
Before
After

To revert the change simply:
sudo mv files.lense.ignore files.lense && unity --replace &

Doing it this way is useful for just temporarily disabling a lense if you're going to take screenshots for example. The other method is a cleaner more permanent solution.