Ubuntu – Gedit 3.6.1, how to increase the number of recent files from its default of 5

Those are just backups of your original files that gedit creates before saving changes to your edited documents.

In gedit preferences you need to disable Create a backup copy of file before saving, and if you want to automatic save your edits automatically set a timer with the option enable Autosave files every X minutes.

That way the ~ will be gone and your last changes will be saved on the file every x minutes in case something goes bad or your computer crashes.

The changes made to the file will be saved to the file itself and not to a temporary file.

Please be aware that if you delete the contents of a file and auto save is enable there will be a chance that you end up with a saved empty file.

Always make sure that when you close on file while auto save is enabled that the contents of the file are correct, else undo them and save the file again.

My "recently" is 5 minutes =)

recently=5
find . -type f -amin "$recently"

Breakdown

• find

  search for files in a directory hierarchy

• .

  search in the current folder and all subfolders

• -type f

  search only fort files

• -amin 5

  File was last accessed 5 minutes ago.

Or perhaps you mean the recently used files in your Desktop Environment, than you need something like

awk -F"file://|\" " '/file:\/\// {print $2}' ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

Breakdown

• awk

  pattern scanning and text processing language

• -F"file://|\" "

  define two field separators, file:// and "

• /file:\/\//

  only lines with file:// are interesting

• {print $2}

  the path is in column 2