Turn off or limit the Recent Documents feature in Ubuntu
If you want to turn off the Recent Documents feature in Ubuntu, all you have to do is create a .gtkrc file in your home directory (if one isn’t already available):
touch ~/.gtkrc-2.0
Now paste this line in there:
gtk-recent-files-max-age=0
The next time you start Gnome and click on files, the respective files won’t appear anymore in Places > Recent Documents.
To limit the number of files that appear in Recent Documents, use
gtk-recent-files-limit=3
instead (replace 3 with the number of files you wish to show).
Nice trick!!!
BUT this is NOT exclusive to Ubuntu… This works for any distro using GNOME.
this trick does also affect the “recent documents” in open office & co, doesn’t it?
@Fabian: no, it doesn’t. Just GNOME.
Nice… works in Karmic too. Best of all it also removes the Recent list in Totem.
Hello,
I wish increase the limit, for 12 files, fbut edit gtk-recent-files-limit=3 in .gtkrc-2.0 don’t works. How did?
Mauricio,
You probably have to restart your computer for the changes to be applied. If that doesn’t work, check if you have Gnome 2.0 or higher; the name of the file you created is .gtkrc2.0. Also, if you want the maximum number of files to be 12, you would want to put “gtk-recent-files-limit=12″ in your .gtkrc2.0 file.
it seems like a good place to point out that this constantly-repeated “method” is NOT true at all.
all these options do is HIDE the “old” / “excess” entries from the gnome “recent files” dialog, and even then the gnome docs explicitly say apps are free to ignore the user’s instructions any time they feel like it. the spyware^W - sorry, “full history” - is still there in ~/.recently-used.xbel
@since this is the #2 google hit.
Do you know any solution?