Request to add option to disable 'Recent Documents' lists.

[TM]

In addition to the ability to list recent documents (Computer->Recent Documents)
and the option to clear the list are both nice, there should also be an option
to disable such behavior completely.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325

[Ben (bhalvorsen)]

(In reply to comment #0)

I agree. A list of recent documents might be of use for some people, but not
for me. All recent documents does is report my recent activities to any other
person who may use my computer. It is annoying that I have to clear it all the
time. So I hope that the recent documents option can be enabled and disabled in
the future.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

I've opened a bug upstream about this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325

According to some other upstream bug you can change the permissions of
~/.recently-used as a workaround for this.

[Daniel Robitaille (robitaille)]

Confirming this bug

[John Doe (jodo-deactivatedaccount)]

+1 from me for this. Didn't found a suitable sulotion for this till now. It would be great to have an option for disabling this completly.

[Kẏra (thekyriarchy)]

+1 from me as well

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks for your comments, but there's no need to put comments with +1 to the report that doesn't help too much and if you want to see this soon you're welcome to submit patches to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325, thanks in advance.

[xne (egger)]

a workaround will be to make the file immutable - so that it can't be changed:
#sudo chattr +i .recently-used.xbel
(only works with ext2/3 filesystems)
best regards,

[ELG (easylinuxguide)]

This has been open since 2005. Is anyone working on adding this as a setting at the very least to gconf-editor? It would be preferable for the Recent Documents to have a preferences option added to its tab. I would love to see something added as it gets rather tedious manually typing commands for every machine and also trying to explain this to new Linux users does not come across as very user friendly. Thanks for all efforts to accomplish this!

[vince (vince06fr)]

+1 for me

the workaround is good and we can use a script ...
But when i do enable Recent Documents, all documents that i accessed when it was disabled, are visible. So i must clear them out again…. this is a big bug for me...

[fermulator (fermulator)]

+1

[Khaled Khalil (khaled-khalil)]

Thomas Spura tells (here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325#c13) that it is already implemented in gtk (http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.15/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-recent-files-max-age).
it is enough (and more appropriate) to add "gtk-recent-files-max-age=0" to ~/.gtkrc-2.0 (create the file if it is not already there).
it works for me.

[Sam Freilich (l33tminion)]

Should still be a way of removing Recent Documents from the Places menu entirely, although the answer in #11 is a decent workaround.

[Michael Kogan (michael-kogan)]

It's better than creating a directory that prevents the file from being generated but for a new user who doesn't know that trick an option like "Number of elements in the <<Recent documents>> list" would be more handy.

[Kẏra (thekyriarchy)]

Updates?