10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs

Leopard limits the maximum number of Recent Places in the pop-up menu of the Open/Save dialog windows to a mere five items. Following this excellent tutorial that robg wrote on finding hidden preferences, I figured out that if there is a hidden preference somewhere, it must live in /System » Library » Frameworks » AppKit.framework » Versions » C » AppKit. Additionally, since nearly all apps in Leopard use the Cocoa Open/Save dialogs, it was obvious that the preference key likely follows the Cocoa naming scheme and begins with NSNav, just like the rest of the bunch.

And the winner is: NSNavRecentPlacesLimit. To apply, type the following in the Terminal, where 12 would be the number of recent places to display in the Open/Save dialogs:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int 12

Alternatively, you can also open ~/Library » Preferences » .GlobalPreferences.plist with your favorite plist editor, add a new key named NSNavRecentPlacesLimit and set an integer value of your choice. (Being not really the Terminal type of guy, this is the way I actually did it.) Once you have "collected" a larger list of places in the popup menu, you will also notice that they are sorted alphabetically, not chronologically, which would actually seem more logical given the term "recent".

In theory, this trick might also work on application basis, but I didn't tested it yet. Also in theory, there might be a way for an app to remember its own set of places instead of fetching the current global list. In a short test (which was an old carbon app running in Rosetta, though) it sort of worked in that sense, in that this particular app showed only the predefined places I've added manually to its plist, but it didn't add any new ones.

To list these items, I simply added a NSNavRecentPlaces array with items containing the POSIX path of the places to the app's plist. This is different than Tiger, where Carbon apps had their own array AppleRecentFolders with file://localhost/... type of URL.) This still needs some more investigation...

try set currentDefault to do shell script "defaults read .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit" as string display dialog "How many Recent Places to show " default answer currentDefault set newdefault to text returned of result do shell script "defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int " & newdefault on error errMsg number errNum from errFrom partial result errResult to errTo if errMsg contains "User canceled" then return else display dialog "Script Error" & return & errMsg end if end try

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10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs
Authored by: jksellors on Jan 10, '09 08:53:23AM

This also works on my Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger machine. Here is an Applescript to set the Recent Places count in the GlobalPreferences:

10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs
Authored by: MarkSieber on Jan 10, '09 08:56:28AM

Typing the recommended text into Terminal made no change. I restarted, tried pasting, typing from scratch, still no change to the number of recent places. I'm not much of a Terminal user--am I missing something obvious?

Thanks in advance,

Mark

10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs
Authored by: MarkSieber on Jan 10, '09 08:58:46AM

To clarify, I'm using 10.5.6

10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs
Authored by: Lou Kash on Jan 11, '09 05:12:51PM

Simply paste it into the Terminal window:
defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int 12

(or any other number of your choice)
... and hit Return.

10.5: Show more Recent Places in Open/Save dialogs
Authored by: UniAce on Feb 19, '11 11:44:37AM

Just used this hint in OS X 10.6.6 and it worked like a charm. I pasted the one line into Terminal, hit enter, and voila! Didn't even have to quit any applications.

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