Annoying Recent Items in the OS X Dock

OS X Lion has this annoying behavior that it will list an apps recently opened files when you open its dock menu. The ugly thing is you can’t turn this of globally and not all apps have their own options to turn this of or clear the list.

Well I have found a (ugly) way to do this, but it works:

rm ~/Library/Preferences/*.LSSharedFileList.plist

You will have to manually kill dock in the activity monitor for the changes to be applied.

But this does not mean that apps won’t produce these lists again. 🙁

You will have to manually deactivate recent files (e.g. for VLC):

defaults write org.videolan.vlc NSRecentDocumentsLimit 0
defaults delete org.videolan.vlc.LSSharedFileList RecentDocuments
defaults write org.videolan.vlc.LSSharedFileList RecentDocuments -dict-add MaxAmount 0

You will have to repeat this for any other application you don’t want to track recent files. 🙁