Recent items menus have stopped working on my iMac

Question

Recently I noticed that on my iMac, running El Capitan, the Open Recent menu has stopped getting updated, both in the Apple menus, and for apps, and both for the Open Recent menu item, and the list that pops up from the Dock.

I checked in System Preferences | General | Recent Items, and it is saying None. I have tried a number of times to reset it to 20, but it shows up as None when I get back in to System Preferences.

I hope someone can help me sort this problem out.

Answer 1

For me, this partially fixed things:

1. Close all open apps.
2. Move ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist (and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist.lockfile if it exists) to a backup directory.
3. Reboot.

In my case this fixed the recent items lists under the File menu in each app and the Apple menu. But the context menus on Dock icons still do not update.

Answer 2

I ran into this today on a month-old iMac. The only thing that isn't fresh about it is my account, which has been replicated across 5 machines and 12 major MacOS versions using Migration Assistant when possible, leaving it with a fair bit of cruft in ~/Library/Preferences/. Unfortunately, in recent versions Apple has made it complicated to clean up that directory effectively by trashing files because cfprefsd manages the real preference info and you need to talk nicely to it with the defaults utility.

Anyway, I fond that every time I tried to change the preference I got a sequence of log entries like this:

Jul 14 18:14:03 extravagant sharedfilelistd[411] <Critical>: [default] [<CFString 0x7fff77ea0e00 [0x7fff77f58440]>{contents = "com.apple.LSSharedFileList.RecentApplications"}] List write failed invalid info items: (null) properties: (null)
Jul 14 18:14:03 extravagant sharedfilelistd[411] <Error>: -[ListStore writeListItems:properties:withListIdentifier:notificationHander:] [com.apple.LSSharedFileList.RecentApplications] List write failed invalid info items: (null) properties: (null)
Jul 14 18:14:05 extravagant com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562] <Warning>: Error getting number of recent items of type 2, LSSharedFileListCopyProperty returned NULL
Jul 14 18:14:11 extravagant com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562] <Warning>: New number of recents: 30
Jul 14 18:14:11 extravagant com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562] <Warning>: Error getting number of recent items of type 1, LSSharedFileListCopyProperty returned NULL
Jul 14 18:14:11 extravagant com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562] <Warning>: Error getting number of recent items of type 2, LSSharedFileListCopyProperty returned NULL
Jul 14 18:14:11 extravagant com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562] <Warning>: Error getting number of recent items of type 3, LSSharedFileListCopyProperty returned NULL
Jul 14 18:14:13 extravagant com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.preference.general.remoteservice[85562]) <Notice>: Service exited due to signal: Killed: 9

Also, both defaults domains and a few dozen files in Preferences told me that most applications with a proper defaults domain like com.example.appname also had a defaults domain like com.example.appname.LSSharedFileList which contained lists of recently used files. Except they weren't recently used files at all. None of the *.LSSharedFileList.plist files had changed since my migration from my old Yosemite machine, and neither had com.apple.recentitems.plist. So I cleaned house by running these commands inside ~/Library/Preferences/:

defaults delete com.apple.recentitems
rm com.apple.recentitems.plist*

The defaults command tells cfprefsd to remove all of the settings in that domain, which leaves a 42-byte logically empty .plist file and a 0-byte .plist.lockfile file which the rm command removes.

defaults find LSSharedFileList |grep 'keys in domain .*LSShared'|cut -d"'" -f2 |xargs -L1 defaults delete
rm  *LSSharedFileList.plist*

Less obvious, but essentially the same thing for all defaults domains with LSSharedFileList in their names

find . -name "*.plist" -print0 |xargs -0 -L1 plutil -lint |grep -v ': OK$'|cut -d: -f1|sed 's/.*/"&"/' |xargs rm

Even less obvious, but apparently crucial. This pipeline finds all of the *.plist files in the current directory (which was ~/Library/Preferences/,) checks each one for validity with plutil -lint, parses out the filenames of those that are not "OK", enquotes them to protect from embedded spaces and the like, and removes them all. In my case the invalid *.plist files were all 0-byte antique files for stuff that can't run on El Cap anyway, so I was sure I was not deleting any actual information. YMMV!!

find . -size 42c -name "*plist" -delete

This swept out any *.plist files that were 42-bytes long, the size of a logically empty plist in binary format. I had a few of those hanging around and they might have been causing the complaint from sharedfilelistd.

killall sharedfilelistd

That terminated the instance of sharedfilelistd running under my account. The system restarted a fresh instance automatically. I'm not sure this was needed, but it seemed prudent since I had just wiped out a bunch of information from the preferences subsystem that was related to the old way of doing what sharedfilelistd apparently does in El Cap.

NOTE: Those 7 commands are the abridged version of what I did that made sense and had effects, scattered across 3 hours of poking around and testing and trying to find info on sharedfilelistd to no avail.

It is also worth noting that there's no sudo involved here, because I was in my own ~/Library/Preferences/, manipulating my own preferences realm. The Recent Items menu and hence its settings are user-specific so wherever that setting is stored (never worked that out...) has to be user-specific as well, not something requiring root to fix. There's a prior response that includes an unexplained massive permission/ACL/flag wipe, run with sudo, that didn't even work for the author, and may cause serious systemic harm. This is nothing like that. Also note that it does not require logging out, rebooting, booting in Recovery Mode, or doing anything else likely to be disruptive.

Answer 3

Open recently used items: Choose Apple menu > Recent Items. You see the apps, documents, and servers that you recently used. For some apps, you can also see the documents you recently worked on. To change the number of items you see in the menu, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click General, then click the “Recent items” pop-up menu and choose a number.

Answer 4

Workaround

For the Recently Used Application list in the Dock, try the following:

1. Open Finder, File > New Smart Folder
2. Press + button next to Save
3. Select "Kind" is "Application"
4. Press + button Select "Last opened date" is "this week"

5. Click Save and check "Add to sidebar"

6. On the sidebar, right click the created Smart Folder and click "Add to Dock"

Answer 5

The following worked for me!
Tried all of the previous answers, but none worked.
Then I came across a fix described here on Apple Forums:

First round (tried, but did not work for me):

Note: The command below changes ownership and access rights on all files in your home/user directory and may have unexpected (and harmful) side effects.

Open Terminal, and type:

echo $TMPDIR

If (and only if) you see something like /var/folders/8b/mn2vgjs10gs83krfy1fwxwb80000gp/T/ as a result, run

sudo find ~ $TMPDIR.. \
         -exec chflags -h nosappnd,noschg,nosunlnk,nouappnd,nouchg,nouunlnk {} + \
         -exec chown -h $UID {} + -exec chmod +rw {} + \
         -exec chmod -h -N {} + -type d -exec chmod -h +x {} + 2>&-

Second round (this one did work for me):

• Start up in Recovery mode.
• In recovery mode, launch terminal (from utilities menu)
• Type resetpassword and hit enter (no worries)
• Select your startup volume
• Select relevant user
• At the bottom, under Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs, click Reset
• I repeated the last to steps for all users + root
• Restart your computer

The description on Apple Forums is really clear, so if in doubt, go there. Hopefully it will help others too.

FYI: All my recent items were gone in all apps, in Apple menu the whole menu item was even gone, and changing in System Preferences from none to whatever kept reverting back to none.
I am on a MacBook Air (early 2014), running El Capitan 10.11.3

Answer 6

The solution is way more simple. Go to System Preferences. General. Recent items: choose between none to 50.

Then restart your computer

Answer 7

I've had the same thing happen within applications but in my finder recent items my shows multiple duplicates of the same recent item and seems to add one every time I open the app again. I tried to screen shot the recent items but of course if you try to hit shift-command-4 it changes the recent items to "show XXXX in finder" because you have held down the command. The favorites are also gone from the dialog boxes. smh what in the F is going on with Apple's dev and QA department in the last few years?

Answer 8

As a work-around use TinkerTool to set your "Recent Items" to which-ever value you like.

So far it seems to behave as expected…

Answer 9

go to "system preferences" > "general" > "recent items" el capitan reset this to zero for some reason set it to whatever list length you like, and it will start working again