How to remove "recent documents" from Thunar file-manager

Howtos FAQ
1

Disable 'recent files' permanently.

If your machine, like my laptop, is sometimes used by others quite often, to do a quick job, check mail or watch a movie, it's *not so nice to have a track record of what was being used and watched and ..... have it show up in the (actually all) file manager under 'recent'.

Really no-one likes that. :pensive_face:

Point is, it's hard to turn-off or even find the setting (it's a Gtk "feature") that controls that event. It's even hard to search it on the net and find a solution that applies to current Gtk-3.

Note:

This will also remove browser recovery (but NOT history) if crashed or inadvertently closed.

Apart from not having 'thunar' NOT show 'recent' by right-clicking in the left-pane and under 'places', un-checking the 'recent' checkbox.

disable-recent
disable-recent1402Ɨ1407 102 KB

Be aware that there will still be a file that keeps track of what has been handled: '~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel'.

To permanently disable it, do the following:

  1. Edit '~/.config/gtk-3/.0/settings.ini' :

    Add gtk-recent-files-max-age=0 and gtk-recent-files-limit=0 under [Settings].

  2. Then rm .local/share/recently-used.xbel* to remove all existing instances of that .xbel file (there's multiple backups).

I'm actually surprised that this feature is so hard to turn off (well it's not really, it's just very unknown) and doesn't come up as an option in i.e the general settings. I cannot be the only one who doesn't like this (creepy) feature, I imagine.

@thanatermesis is it an idea I add a widget for that in 'elive-center' under maybe a new 'privacy' section?

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me does :slight_smile:

is very useful to have a fast, direct access to a file you used recently, think on a repetitive taskā€¦

on the other hand, about privacy, yes there is a point for thatā€¦ but, on my case, only me uses my computer and I leave it with the screen locked, so i donā€™t care about the possibility of other person seeing my files, this should be the correct behaviour for most of the people in fact, every person should have its own user, entirely

Note: I think this post is on the wrong topic, we should move it to ā€œHowtoā€™sā€ and change the title to a good one with optimal keywords, so that people searching on google ā€œhow to disable ā€¦.ā€ will find it here and discover elive :magick:

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For that reason I have my file-order set to ā€œmodification dateā€. :innocent:

Will do! :saluting_face:

Done. :w00t: