GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 681468
No means to limit number of files shown in Recent
Last modified: 2021-06-18 15:29:26 UTC
There seems to be no setting to adjust what's shown in Places > Recent, either by number or age. At least here, Ubuntu 12.10, nautilus 3.5.5, it just shows all previously opened, currently after a week have 1083 files in Recent
Is there a reason why it should be limited? Do you see performance issues, or something else?
==> NEEDINFO
I'll venture a guess: - Over a hundred items, people are not really going to bother looking further - Performance may be affected? - Perhaps it could add more items on the fly if the user scrolls towards the bottom (like twitter does)
Confirming this bug. My main reasoning is that this is a privacy issue: on a kiosk (or other shared machine), every user can see the perviously accessed files. Setting gtk-recent-files-max-age=0 gtk-recent-files-limit=0 in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini doesn't seem to work. The only useful workaround is chattr +i .local/share/recently-used.xbel but then you always see error messages when launching GTK apps from a terminal.
Searching a bit further showed the need to add a tag in front of the above lines. This keeps the recently-used.xbel empty and the Places menu correctly greyed out: [Settings] gtk-recent-files-max-age=0 gtk-recent-files-limit=0
The problem with a gtk-3.0/settings.ini is it doesn't work with anything other than 0 which defeats the whole purpose of a Recent place. There doesn't seem to be any performance issue, it's more about "Recent" I'm pretty sure almost all users don't consider "Recent" to mean "History" & Recent should reflect recently accessed/used, not every entry in recently-used.xbel that nautilus draws from.to pop. the place
The privacy aspect is covered by the new Privacy Settings ('gnome-control-center privacy'). It lets us turn recent history off or change the max-age. So, we are left here with the performance issue (bug 682836), which is blocking bug 680982. (In reply to comment #3) > - Perhaps it could add more items on the fly if the user scrolls towards the > bottom (like twitter does) This is has also been proposed for Search on bug 698906.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version of Files (nautilus), then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.