How to disable the most recently used items in App Exposé on Lion?

Question

When using App Exposé on Lion ( Control-↓ by default), the lower part of the screen above the dock is reserved for minimized windows. A new feature of at least TextEdit in Lion is that it also shows the most recent documents as icons, which makes for an absolutely crowded area. I never use MRUs in my workflow so that's an absolute waste of space and of time.

Is it possible to disable this behavior and only show minimized windows?

Answer 1

Apparently setting the Number of recent items to None in general preferences does the trick.

Unfortunately it also disables the Open Recent submenu, but I honestly care less: having an uncluttered minimized windows list in Exposé is much more important.

Answer 2

I managed to figure out how to clear and permanently disable this in Expose so figured I'd post here.

I'm using BBEdit but imagine the steps are the same for TextEdit(?)

You have to set the Recent Items to 0 (as above) AND delete the contents of: /Users/[your username here]/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.PreferenceData/

(As I say I imagine there's something similar for TextEdit)

This folder rather astonishingly contained the history of every file I have EVER edited in BBEdit(!!) some 4000 odd files - also a security risk in my book.

If you were very paranoid (as am I) you could also chmod this folder to be readable only so it is never written to:

sudo chmod -R 444 /Users/[your username here]/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.PreferenceData/

Hope that helps... Apple/BBEdit should really include this functionality within Expose as an option so we can turn it off in my humble opinion.

Answer 3

I have just cleared recent items by going to apple menu, selecting "Recent Items" then "Clear Menu".