The feature "recent documents" has no obvious way of configuring. This is necessary for any KDE installation in public, in an office or even family where there is more than one user to expected to look at the screen some times... Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. use some files 2. use the plasma search or look at recent douments 3. the results list all files including private ones Actual Results: The only way to keep the "recent documents" list and the plasma search clean is not to open any files you would not want your spouse, your boss, your coworker to see within a list of used files on your desktop. People get fired from their job because someone saw them checking their private Ebay sales aution progress... Or you have to clean recent documents all the time which renders the funcionality completely useless. Expected Results: There should be a simple KCM or at least a config file to - switch of the gathering of "recent documents" (setting the permissions of the link folder to 000 is the most clumsy workaround ever) - configuration options to control which application's files are gathered in the list - configuration option to filter the files via filemask that are gathered - configure the number of files in the list and an expiration time The same applies to the "recent application" list... Also one would expect these settings to be apllied also to the krunner list and everywhere where plasmasearch is used... This is not a matter of taste. Bugs (or misconstructed features if you will) like this prevent the use of KDE in a corporate or office environment. They are annoying in a private environment. And even if you are the only person ever working at your PC and you have no privacy concerns at all you still might want to filter the results of "recent documents" to be useful for you... for example I checked about 20 CSS files for errors within the last two hours but I do not need a list of these 20 files cluttering my "recent" list or search results. Easy way would be to exclude *.css files from gathering within the "recent" list... People in many cases switch off their quick search functionality in their browsers - they do not want the desktop to reintroduce the quick search problem. thx, piedro
While I agree with everything you've said, Application Menu is not the right component for this as it's a more general problem. Application Menu uses the KRecentDocument system in the KIO framework for this, as do many other pieces of code, notably every app that actually adds to the list (e.g. anything using KFileDialog). Merely hiding Recent Documents in Application Menu would not be good enough because the list still exists. Now, the good news is that KRecentrDocument already has a config option to turn it off - it's just not exposed in the GUI anywhere right now (or maybe "not anymore"). So the discussion should be about where to place it.
CC'ing Marco as the overall workspace maintainer.
CC'ing Ivan who works on the successor technology to KRecentDocument, KAMD.
It's interesting that Desktop Behavior -> Activities already has options to disable KAMD's document history tracking. Maybe we should just get clever and have this disable KRecentDocument as well?
thx for you attention, Eike! The Desktop Behavior -> Activities seems inconsistent at the moment: there is the option to "only remember documents opened by applications in the following list:" and a checkbox to "exclude all applications that are not mentioned in the list" This seems to be the same thing and I could not verify this is working at all. Also, I think you are right, there should be only one system be used and one KCM module (preferrable under "search" or "privacyl settings") where all these options for the desktop search are configured. I do not think any user should have to distinguish beetween baloo's "file search" with excluded or included folders (lots of options missing here still!), Krecentdocuments that can, as you mention, only be switched off or off and also KActivities with another, now application based, system to exclude from search... To be honest I do not understand why this problem comes up in 2015. There has been years of discussion and solutions for desktop search like "tracker" or "beagle". The code may not be useful at all but the concepts do not get old. I am not talking about the storage or database or other technical aspects. I am talking about the user experience. For example: Tracker integrated in Nautilus offered a journal/calendar tab that showed recent/used documents by the day of use. More like a browser journal. There has been options to set exactly what kind of files your journal should or shouldn't include. Still there was a big discussion about security and privacy concerning the initial settings after installtion and missing features all over the place... How can the usability of software evolve if these past discussions and experiences get ignored and now KDE starts all over again with the concept of desktop searching and the problems connected to it. Same arguments, same discussion, same mistakes... We know from past experiences and discussions what users like: 1) - a fast desktop search not using too much ressources indexing Could not Baloo do all of it, just wondering? 2) - a simple way to configure and finetune what's included and excluded This is essential for privacy concerns of the user and the feeling of being "in control" and also for security reasons from an admins perspective... 3) - a comprehensive UI to look at, sort and filter the "recently used files" (I think Dolphin is on the right track! - just not yet: the timelines and the quickfilters like "/audio" should be easily combinable and the filtering should get results out of subfolders - as is at the moment it is not very quick to really find something specific) 4) - an UI option to quickly flush ALL "recent documents" systems and subsystems, preferrable with an option to flush selectively "All documents from this month" or "All documents opened by KMymoney" - something like a "Quick Cleanup Journal"-button or applet in the panel... I apologize for the long post, this will not happen again, thx for reading nevertheless, piedro
Please let's keep this ticket focused and not go overboard with mission statements and long-winded agenda posts, it's not productive, and the bug tracker is not the right venue for it. Regarding (4), we used to have https://www.kde.org/applications/utilities/sweeper/ which was also embedded into System Settings - my guess is it's not been ported to KF5 yet.
As I said: I apologize. Sweeper is not very flexibel: "delete all recent documents entries" is a clumsy brute force method. imho - there should be filters to select which ones BTW: I tried sweeper - has no effect on K-Menue nor the dolphin quick filters Where to discuss general concepts? The forums do not get a lot dev attention, requests are about adding more features not about cleaning up conceptional consistency... I know here is not the place for this but where is it? I mean realistically: where should I basic wellknown concepts of unified desktop search when there are three different projects involved focussed on bugfixing and adding more features... ? Thx fior reading, piedro
How to edit my comment, there's grammatical mistakes...? p:
A bit late to the party, but... These are the planned features when/if kactivities stats replace the recent documents. (recent documents is a very crude xdg spec, I don't see a benefit in improving that part, and have no idea who is the maintainer of the component) Current features of kamd: - forgetting the recent documents like in a web browser "forget the past 1 hour" and similar - forgetting older events than n months - setting for which applications the recent documents should be tracked Planned: - making an activity private - so that nothing is saved when in 'gift shopping' activity (like the private browsing mode in web browsers) - (for advanced users) custom ignore patterns
That sounds promising. thx for the update, piedro
+1 to push for the activity features
@ivan: Now in the announcements of the latest plasma release there has been stated that now activities took over the "recent documents"... sadly in the kicker menu I do not see any evidence for that nor is there any settings or documentation. Could you please clarify how this works or is set up? As of now I feel it is another bug that the old way of "recent documents" is still present though the release announcement stated otherwise. Should I open another bug for this? Secondly the private activities have been announced to have been released also. But same thing: no settings nor documentation... So how to use it? Or is the announcement plainly wrong? Or do I have to explicitly remove or add packages for that? Or is this a new bug being present but not replacing the old? Again: Should I open another bug for that? thx for working on this, piedro
It is available in Kicker (see Eike's blog post). Kickoff is not using the new system yet. You'll not see much difference ui-wise - it is just a data model change - the UI stays the same. As for the 'private activities', the feature landed in kactivities framework, but it is not exposed in the UI. There are some 'creative differences' regarding the activities settings module.
^ Kickoff will soon be ported to the Kicker backend for parity. Then you'll have per-document and per-application and global forgetting all right in the launcher.
Now this is really good news, thx for sharing! happy (well not yet... but eventually), piedro
So whether it's in the GUI or in a config file... How do I disable History in the launcher?
Since 5.5 Kickoff uses Kicker's backend meaning disabling recent documents in acivities settings will stop adding them to the recent list in Kickoff.