Sep 25 2009
Fix for perpetually empty “Open Recent…” items in Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard
It’s been bugging me for a while now that – ever since upgrading to Xcode 3.2 and Mac OS 10.6 – the list of recent projects in Xcode’s initial window and in its “Open Recent File” and “Open Recent Project” menus are all blank.
Thanks to @pimpinglen, I found the answer here: the “Documents” value under “Number of recent items” in “System Preferences“‘ “Appearance” section (phew) now applies system-wide to all Cocoa applications!
I had this set to “None” in OS 10.5.8, and this setting remained on upgrade.
One solution to this problem is to change the value on a per-application basis:
defaults write com.apple.Xcode NSRecentDocumentsLimit -int 10
… which keeps the system “Recent Items” menu tidy – but does require manual setup for each application, and is somewhat non-obvious to change from then onwards…
24th April 2010 @ 4:23 pm
Excellent tip, thanks! I particularly thank you for the per-application setting.
10th July 2010 @ 8:19 pm
Thanks! This was driving me crazy – though it was a cache permission issue of some kind…
26th August 2010 @ 1:14 am
I found this page from Google, whilst trying to figure out why this was happening with my recently installed Xcode 4 Developer Preview.
As I found out, the issue is the same, but the bundle identifier has changed, it’s now com.apple.dt.Xcode
Maybe this is just so the DP and normal versions can co-exist, but I thought I’d mention it just in case.
Thanks for the tip!
10th June 2012 @ 9:02 pm
Nice tip. Thanks for posting.