Is the Activity Log Manager working on Ubuntu-MATE?

I'm trying to blacklist the cover.jpg files in my music collection to show up in my Recent Documents list. For that effect I installed the Activity Log Manager. However whatever I do on this application, it does not result in the Music folder being ignored.

I've also tried to simply turn Record file and application usage off, by clicking the slider button. But files will still get logged to Recent Documents. Apparently this is not the way to control the Recent Documents list on the MATE Panel Places menu. If so, what would be?

Hi marfig

From what I read Activity Log Manager uses zeitgeist and it looks like our 16.04 relies on

~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel

for tracking recent documents.

Remove that file and Recent Items in the menu will be removed.

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Of course! Silly me. It says so right on the package description. Thanks @anon42388993! I have removed zeitgeist a long time ago, so even if it did something, the Activity Log Manager wouldn’t work without it. On a unrelated note the package is missing a Recommends to zeitgeist. I’ll fill in a bug report.


I’m not very happy with how the Recent documents currently works. It’s too limited. I require the ability to define the maximum number of entries and blacklist files or directories, preferably with support for regex expressions. I think I’ll forget about MATE implementations and I’ll instead do something on bash with either YAD or dzen.

I want to learn about both Caja and the MATE panel interface and applet programming. I wanted to create a new weather applet, for instance. But I just can’t seem to find enough motivation currently to study it. So a script with YAD or dzen will suffice for now.

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