Ubuntu – Prevent gnome-shell’s dash from listing Recent Items

11.10activities-overviewgnomegnome-shellzeitgeist

I am using gnome-shell in Ubuntu 11.10. I am getting annoyed when dash search lists Recent Items. I have tried many ways to prevent it like

  • Deleting activity.sqlite and activity.sqlite-journal files under ~/.local/share/zeitgeist

  • Adding all the possible entries in Activity Log Manager to prevent application logging

  • Specifying time range in Activity Log Manager to forget my activities.

But none of the methods are working. The recent items list is still populated.

Is there any way to tell dash not to list Recent Items while searching, other than the above methods? Or is there any way to delete the recent items list?

Best Answer

Gnome-shell uses recently-used and not Zeitgeist to display your recent items.

to disable it follow theses steps:

delete recently-used.xbel:

rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

create a new empty file:

touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

make sure the new file cannot be modified:

sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

now, your display of recent items is gone.

If you want to revert back, remove the i attribute of recently-used.xbel:

sudo chattr -i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

all credits to : http://knezevblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/how-to-ubuntu-clear-and-disable-recent.html