HOW-TO: Enable and Disable the Recently Used Menu in Gnome

[fermulator]

Creating the bogus .recently-used.xbel directory worked for me in Jaunty.

[P3P]

From https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=305325#c13



This is already implemented in gtk.

Add "gtk-recent-files-max-age=0" to your ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

'Something to click' is just missing

See:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2...-files-max-age

[alex_o]

sudo chattr +i recently-used.xbel

that worked a treat...

to undo:
sudo chattr -i .recently-used.xbel

just install ubuntu-tweak and go to DESKTOP>GNOME and under history uncheck Enable system-wide "Recent Documents" list

http://ubuntu-tweak.com/downloads

[Rumored]

Since deleting the whole thing wastes a lot of space in the gnome-shell, I wrote a tiny python mess to remove specific entries matching any python regex patterns:
http://pastebin.com/dakpXq0z

save as ~./cleanme.py , make it executable, run as
"~./cleanme.py SomeStuffYouDontWant SomeMoreStuffToDelete morePr0n ..."

careful, doesn't backup anything, no warranty that it works, might shoot you in the face...
it should print out the elements it's deleting though, so you can always pipe it into a backup file...

Protip: add it to your crontab as an hourly job, easiest with "Scheduled Tasks" UI in Gnome (sudo aptitude install gnome-schedule)

[jmagsho]

Thanks, I had forgotten this, and the terminal commands worked like a charm in Lynx.

[dcstar]

No having .recently-used.xbel working breaks the Library (the list of VMs) of VMware Player 3.1.0.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-tweak/+bug/585268

[Ubunthree]

I have this little script which deletes a bunch of history-type things when I run it:

#!/bin/bash

rm -r /home/username/.macromedia
rm /home/username/.config/google-chrome/Default/History
rm -r /home/username/.cache/google-chrome
rm -r /home/username/.thumbnails

Does anything bad happen if I add this line:

rm /home/username/.recently-used*

And is there a way to get a script to run automatically at logoff/shutdown, the way you can at startup?

Thanks!

[solitaire]

Easier option is to point the cache & thumbnails folders to the /tmp/* folder so it's wiped at every reboot
I've got a simple script to recreate the folders at every boot.

[jocheem67]

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.local.shutdown: Local shutdown script.
#
rm -f /home/#/.recently-used.xbel
rm -f /home/#/.recently-used.xbel.*
rm -rf /home/#/.macromedia/Flash_Player/#SharedObjects/*
rm -rf /home/#/.macromedia/Flash_Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/*
rm -r /home/#/.thumbnails/*

Works with Arch, I guess that Ubuntu has a similar routine?