Restoring the Recent Items menu in Mac apps if upgrading to Snow Leopard has revealed that they are always empty
By Jaems • Sep 14th, 2009 • Category: TutorialsMany users (myself included) have noticed to their dismay, that the Recent Items menu of the native Mac applications such as Preview and Text Edit are empty no matter how many times they are opened. I had to choose the wording of this posts’s title carefully because the current theory seems to indicate that the upgrade to Snow Leopard didn’t cause the missing Recent Items menu, but that the problem had already existed, and the upgrade merely revealed it. Regardless of the reason, the Recent Items menu can be restored by dragging the file com.apple.recentitems.plist to the Trash, emptying the Trash, then rebooting. The com.apple.recentitems.plist can be found in Users/yourname/Library/Preferences
Move com.apple.recentitems.plist to the Trash
After you reboot, the Recent Items list should be populated again the next time you open files. I’d also like to add that it’s a good idea to be careful when using third-party Cache Cleaners, perhaps to the point of not using them at all. I’m pretty sure that this is how I broke my preferences. In most cases, the Macintosh OS has built-in cache cleaners and maintenance tools that will operate correctly, and that are fully supported.
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In Leopard and all previous versions of OSX the recent items in the “apple” on the tool bar were handled separately from the recent items in Apple native programs like Keynote, etc. While I’d like to keep the recent items in the programs visible when I open each program, I definitely don’t want them to appear in the “apple” menu. Any thoughts on this?
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Hi Bardo.
Sure! You can set that here:
System Preferences > Appearance > Number of Recent Items: None (for Applications), None (for Documents), None (for Servers)
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Unfortunately, this doesn’t allow me Program Specific management of my recent items. This is a global setting that overrides the program specific settings in Apple Native programs like Keynote and iWeb.
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Bardo,
You are absolutely right. And I am not sure why Apple did this, it was a terrible idea. I’m not aware of any fix at the moment.
Sorry,
J
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