Comment 11 for bug 41651

@Matti @Francesco

Yes, Francesco's solution solves partially the problem as I understand. The issue is that Kate (or KDE, or Linux, whatever) uses a different approach to the "Recent documents" functionality as one is used to. See OpenOffice for example.

As I understand, the "Recent documents" are associated with a session. So if you configure Kate to create a new session every time, the "Recent documents" will always be empty after just opening the editor, hence the "bug" (between quotes, because it might be the intended behavior according to the developers).

Having Kate reopen the same session as before brings back the "Recent documents" from the last session, but also automatically opens any documents which were open before. Personally, that's not the behavior I want. I want it to work like OpenOffice, for instance: when you start it, it comes with a blank document but the "Recent documents" menu is filled with the documents I opened in the previous sessions.

Furthermore, this workaround of "Load last-used session" doesn't work if Kate is opened via double-click on a text file. When you do that, Kate will start a new session and the only document on the "Recent documents" list will be the one you've just opened. Again, that is not how OpenOffice (and many other editors) work.

Although this is not a deal breaker and I'm 50% content with the "Load last-used session" solution, I do hope KDE developers change the behavior of the "Recent documents" list to be like OpenOffice. That's the intuitive meaning of this menu for me. They could even create two menus: "Recent documents" and "Session documents", for instance.