MacOS – “Recent Items” menu item disappears from Apple menu

macosmenu bar

Disappearing "Recent Items" menu item

Since upgrading to El Capitan 10.11.1, the "Recent Items" menu item from the Apple menu disappears. Even during a work session, sometimes "Recent Items" is there when I need it, sometimes it disappears altogether.

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Multiple Items on Submenu

Furthermore, when the menu does mysteriously return it has multiple items repeating in the list of the "Recent Items" submenu.

Is this a common El Capitan bug? Should I have done a clean install instead of an upgrade? Any way to fix either problem, the disappearing menu item or the multiple submenu items?

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Best Answer

Rebuild LaunchServices Library

From this discussion board I learned to "rebuild the LaunchServices library". I do not understand the details, but this one line executed in Terminal.app does the trick:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Then restart your Mac. Relaunching the Finder is not enough, you must restart your Mac to get back your Recent Items menu.

Good news: It works.

Bad news: The effect is temporary. Eventually (days, weeks) your Recent Items menu will either disappear or develop duplicates.

Because this is only a partial workaround, and not a true fix, I will not mark this Answer (my own) as Accepted. Hopefully someone else might post a real fix.

I suspect, but have not proven, that the real solution is a clean-install. I took some bad advice and upgraded in-place to Mavericks and El Capitan. Next time I do a major upgrade I will go back to the tried-and-true method of a clean install.

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