How to Disable the ‘Recent’ Files Section in Nautilus

There’s one feature in the Nautilus file manager I use daily: the Recent files shortcut. One-click gives me access to my most recently downloaded, modified, and newly created files together, regardless of the folder they’re in.

I find it dead handy – but I can accept that it’s dead revealing too.

Which is why not everyone likes this functionality. While individual files can be hidden from view manually¹, that’s effort. Sensitive documents, secret projects, risqué media with revealing thumbnails (you know I mean²) can easily, if accidentally appear on screen.

Others simply don’t use the feature and would prefer the remove the bookmark so it’s not taking up space at the top of the sidebar – which is fair.

It is easy to disable the Recent files entry in Nautilus, although there’s no option to do so present in the Nautilus preferences panel, which is where most people go to look.

Instead, the way to disable recent files in Ubuntu (and other GNOME-based Linux distributions) is through the privacy section in the Settings app, like so:

1. Open the Settings app
2. Select Privacy & Security in the Settings app sidebar
3. In the main view, select File History & Trash
4. Slide the toggle to turn off ‘File History’

With File History turned off, the sidebar in Nautilus file manager no longer shows a ‘Recent’ entry.

Note: turning this off doesn’t prevent files from being indexed, searched for, or surfaced through other means – there are other ways to control those.

And it’s worth being aware that disabling recent files in the privacy panel will affect all apps that are able to plug in to and fetch a list of recent files, i.e., not just Nautilus.

Those who prefer to use the command line to accomplish things can do it in one command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.privacy remember-recent-files false

The command hides the “Recent” sidebar entry from Nautilus file manager (next time it is quit completely).

To later re-enable the “Recent” sidebar entry the command should be run again, this time without ‘false’ at the end, like so:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.privacy remember-recent-files

And that’s all there is to it.

1. Worth noting: you can right-click on any file in the Recent ‘folder’ and select the ‘Remove from recents’ option to hide it from view. ↩︎
2. Leaked Spice Girls demos, obviously. ↩︎