The Cinnamon desktop environment has a feature of showing "Recent Files", how can this feature be disabled?
1 Answer
Nowadays you can pull up the menu, type 'privacy' and click on the 'privacy' icon that should appear. Turn off 'remember recently accessed files'.
The previous solution before this was introduced in the GUI was the below, which should now be redundant and left for curiosity only:
A simple hack to disable the feature:
- Remove the file containing a list of Recent Files:
rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
- Create a new file that is completely empty:
touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
- Change the attribute of this file to "immutable", meaning that it "cannot be modified, it cannot be deleted or renamed, no link can be created to this file and no data can be written to the file. Only the superuser or a process possessing the CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute":
sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
- The (empty) file is now immutable, meaning that the "Recent Files" feature is for all intents and purposes disabled, as no new list of recent files can be created.
Alternately:
- Create a folder named
recently-used.xbel
and set it read only.
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2There is an on/off switch. Take a look into Cinnamon Preferences -> Privacy.– dtrunkAug 29, 2015 at 14:49
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1If this option wasn't anywhere before this was introduced on Oct 14 '14: github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master/files/usr/lib/…– dtrunkSep 1, 2015 at 17:49