Modify the number of items in the Open Recent menu

Sep 22, '05 09:06:00AM

Contributed by: chtito

The following hint is documented elsewhere on the Internet, but not here as far as I can tell. This should work with all versions of Mac OS X.

Ever noticed the "Open Recent" item on the File menu? It records the last opened documents in a given application. By default, the number of items remembered is 10, but that number can be modified as follows:

[robg adds: This setting works as described, and takes effect in any given app as soon as you re-launch the app after making the change. Note that if you've set an application-specific limit, it will overrule the system-wide setting. If you want the system-wide setting to again take precedence, use defaults delete com.apple.app_name NSRecentDocumentsLimit to remove the application-specific setting.

I believe that you can determine the 'defaults name' for any given application by looking in your Preferences folder, and then just dropping the ".plist" from the file's name. Test it with a defaults read in the Terminal to see what comes up -- so de.codingmonkeys.SubEthaEdit.plist becomes defaults read de.codingmonkeys.SubEthaEdit, for instance. If that fails (i.e. you don't see any output), you can try defaults read | grep Progam_Name in the Terminal. Somewhere in the output, you should see the domain you need to use.

Finally, not all applications use the Open Recent menu item, and this setting won't work in such programs.]

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