Recent files

[Mishimainizu]

Is there in MX Linux a way to show "Recently used files" somewhere as in Windows? (I mean files,not apps).

Thank you

[richb]

In XFCE there is a panel item called Places that shows recent files as well as mounted partitions. Right click on the Panel and choose Panel then Add items. Scroll down to Places and add to panel. Left clicking on its icon will open a popup and at the bottom is an item Recent Documents. Clicking on that will show recently used documents. images, etc.

[Mishimainizu]

Thank you very much richb! I had this item installed some time ago, but didn't notice the Recent Documents item.

[Jerry3904]

Interesting. I looked for this, and found that there is a file where the info is supposedly stored: ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel. It's not very readable though, and I'm not sure ATM how to get it parsed.

[Jerry3904]

There is a CLI command that lists all modified files in a certain time period

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find -type f -mtime -7

That shows files from the last 7 days, and you can dump that in a text file with an addition

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find -type f -mtime -7 > last7.txt

Finally if you are looking for something in particular, say a libreoffice file, you can do something like this:

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find -type f -mtime -7 | grep libreoffice > last7_LO.txt

But I don't know finally how useful any of that would be, just fooling around...

[skidoo]

Some applications do not write entries to recently-used.xbel
Even if thunar "Open With" does create an entry (I haven't checked)... the handling app may, or may not, create additional entries for each additional file that is subsequently loaded via Drag-Drop or via File-}Open

A while back, I investigated the prospect of writing a script to "forensically" determine recently used (accessed) files...
and quickly realized this prospect is foiled by our (MX, and antiX, and just about every desktop linux distro) use of noatime or relatime or lazyatime mount options specified in /etc/fstab

FWIW, during an antiX/MX liveboot session, with on-demand (aka "semi-automatic" mode) persistence enabled, a slightly-modified version of the persist-save script can generate a list of recently changed (CREATED//DELETED//EDITED) files.
howto:
Copy the script to a new name (e.g. "persist-save-check")
Add "--dry-run" (and, optionally -verbose) to the rsync options
Redirect the output to /tmp/changed_list.txt
Optionally, insert into the script a tailend "myfavetexteditor /tmp/changed_list.txt" line