Ubuntu – Is Privacy’s Delete History button supposed to delete Nautilus’ Recent Items

I don't know why removing recently-used.xbel isn't working. But if you want to do it the clicky way:

1. Select all files in Recent
2. Right-click on the selected files
3. Click on Remove from Recent

* on ubuntu 18.04

I would say that the problem here is a bug in Geany, which is responsible for populating your recent files list with the faulty entry. It should be using a 'real path' instead of a path with . in it when creating these entries.

https://github.com/geany/geany/blob/12b9f27a795f7ec8c1faf6c225314a09b6c5f7af/src/ui_utils.c

I can't see where your . filepath would have come from. I tried opening a file in Geany, and the new entry in ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel that appeared had the correct filename there, not a .. But if there is some use-case where you can open a directory in Geany, then that could be how you ended up with this entry in your recently-used file list. I would simply remove the whole chunk for the recently-used file list (or delete the file completely and restart, I can't imagine that would cause problems)