Xfce Forum

sonichy

Member

Registered: 2023-08-15

Posts: 14

[Thunar] How to disable recent visited ?

It may cause privacy leaks.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,481

Re: [Thunar] How to disable recent visited ?

Out of curiosity, how would it case "privacy leaks"? Its basically a method for tracking opened files within the context of a user environment. It doesn't leak information out like other tracking services might.

Regardless, the file that stores the information is located at ~/local/share/recently-used.xbel. With GTK apps, you can disable the tracking of recently used files by adding:

[Settings]
gtk-recent-files-enabled=0

...to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. Note: this will only impact GTK apps.

Also, with thunar, you can right-click on "Places", select "Places" and uncheck "Recent" to hide the display of that entry.

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sonichy

Member

Registered: 2023-08-15

Posts: 14

Re: [Thunar] How to disable recent visited ?

Thunar, right-click on "Places", "Places" uncheck "Recent" is good for me.

kreemoweet

Member

Registered: 2019-12-01

Posts: 7

Re: [Thunar] How to disable recent visited ?

Unchecking "Recent" in Thunar does not stop the logging of opened files by Thunar (and others), it is just
not displayed in Thunar's side panel. However, assigning the "immutable" attribute to the recently-used.xbel
file will stop it cold. Thunar will then complain endlessly in the x-session-errors file about not being able to
write or change permissions on recently-used.xbel.

conserned_user

Member

Registered: 2024-11-12

Posts: 1

Re: [Thunar] How to disable recent visited ?

Hi,
Can you please add a way to disable this completely with graphical user interface.
For my purposes we have no need this. Many users use the same account and we do no appreciate this tracking feature. Hiding it is not a good solution if turning it back on shows that it was still tracking everything the whole time. It would also be great if only super users can enable or disable it.

I did make recently-used.xbel  read only but doing that cause some stability issues we had to turn it back on. I'm back where again because we need and want this to be disabled.

I will be checking will be checking this thread frequently for updates but for now I will be looking for alternatives that do not have this flaw, any suggestion will be appreciated. Thunar is actually one of the reasons we chose to use Mint XFCE, we originally didn't like how the one in Linux mint cinnamon worked and the Thunar was the closest to windows explorer and it had least resistance to people we were trying to convince and get them to use linux.