Weekly Emacs tip #26 — Recentf: keep track of recently edited files

Most “ordinary” editors I know keep a list of the most recently opened files in their File menu. Emacs (of course) can have that too, through the built-in recentf package. Loading that package adds a submenu called Open Recent to the File menu. Alternatively, one can call M-x recentf or M-x recentf-open to open one of those recently visited files.

The number of files that is saved in that list can be set through the variable recentf-max-saved-items. The default value is 20, which is enough for me.

My use-package config below also adds a series of items to the recentf-exclude list. For example, I don’t want to store files I opened via Tramp (with SSH or via sudo) in my list of recently edited files. The main reason for this is that I found that having these “remote” files in the list slows Emacs down because it tries to verify if those files are still accessible. As a result, Emacs will ask for the password(s) needed to access those locations. The manual mentions the variable remote-file-name-access-timeout, which should help to avoid this. It turns out this was added to the recently release Emacs v30.1. I haven’t tested this yet.

The :hook block in my config is how I enable recentf-mode. What it does is the following: it adds the call to recentf-mode to the after-init-hook variable, which means the function is called once the initialisation of an Emacs session has completed.

(use-package recentf
  :hook (after-init . recentf-mode)
  :config
  (dolist (itm '("^/ssh:" "^/sudo:" "~/.emacs.d/.cache/.*" "recentf$"))
           (add-to-list 'recentf-exclude itm))
  )