Hey

This little tip will show you how you change change the number of recent places in the open/save dialog window. This is the list you see what you click on the drop down window. Its a pretty neat trick which is kinda obvious. I can’t take credit for this trick I found it on macosxhints, this is also a “heads up” for Alberto who emailed me about such a trick in October. Having looked through my emails I kinda came across this tip although I didn’t have the patient to see the results.

Anyway open Terminal and type the following. Change the number at the end to the amount of recent places you want in your list. Don’t have too many, around 10-15 is a good number. Note the original number is 5.

defaults write .GlobalPreferences NSNavRecentPlacesLimit -int 12

Hit return and you are done. It will take a couple of minutes to about an hour for the list to fully propogate. List selecting random files doesn’t seem to do the trick. It takes a while to slowly fill up. For example in the image below I only have 7 items, so it is slowly filling up.

This will work for any modern Cocca app. Most of your older applications may not work with this hack. Try it out and see what the results are. It does take a while to get going so if you don’t see immediate results give it a while before wondering what is going on.

If you want to take your skills with Terminal a bit further I recommend you check out the Terminal Category on this site. If you fancy reading a book there is a couple on Amazon that I regularly see mentioned and recommend, O’reilly Unix Geeks and Unix Under the Hood both are designed for Mac OS X and take Terminal further.