Where to find recent files and how to manage them?

Question

I am aware that in distributions such as Ubuntu it is very easy to clear recent files, but I have three questions about recent files:

1. Does window manager handle these or the Linux itself?
2. Where can I find the history and how to manage them manually?
3. Are they usually in same place across different distributions?

I am sitting on Arch Linux with i3 window manager.

Answer 1

It is the desktop environment that does handle recent files (KDE uses baloo for example, Nautilus uses ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel). There is no uniform way of handling recent files.

Potential candidates for what you are looking for are:

• the DBus file managers interface, but I have not found anything relevant in the Dolphin implementation
• the Recent File Storage Specification but I'm not aware of any implementations
• the st_atime field from the struct stat structure written by the stat system call, but it would show any access, not only when a user opens the file and is not guaranteed to be available for the filesystem (see the noatime option when mounting a filesystem, in the Filesystem Independent Mount Options)

Your best bet is to write you own library which would then use KDE/GNOME libraries (or any other backend, if there are other desktop environments which implement these features) to get the data.

The i3 window manager does not implement this however since it does only handle window management and almost nothing else.