Change the maximum age or number of "recently used" files

[disciple]

Modern versions of GTK have a "recently used" item in the side pane of the standard GTK open/save dialogues.
This is rather handy, but I find that it lists too few items.
You can control the maximum age and/or number of remembered "recently used" items by putting these settings somewhere like ~/.gtkrc-2.0

Code: Select all

gtk-recent-files-max-age=90
gtk-recent-files-limit=200

I guess you might need to reboot or restart all gtk programs or something after changing these settings.

The main limitation is supposed to be that programs can choose to ignore the setting and only show however many items their authors choose*
I'm not sure how common a problem that is (perhaps very common - see below).

I have only just found out how to do this, so I don't know things like how it responds to using very large numbers. I'm also wondering if other programs like X session managers might override the settings and trim the recently used list. In my current system I've only ever noticed 10 items displayed in the list**, although there may be a few more (currently 13) actually stored in ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

BTW, you can manually delete items by editing ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
I've seen references to ~/.recently-used.xbel instead, but it doesn't seem to be used in my system.

My system also has a file in a different format called ~/.recently-used, which seems to be used by some Mono programs and perhaps openoffice when it isn't configured to use the GTK open/save dialogues.

* I think programs can choose to not write to the recently used list as well.
** According to http://developer.gnome.org/gtk/2.24./Gt ... es-max-age the defaults are supposed to be 50 and 30.