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Recent Menu Icon Recent Menu Help

Overview

What Recent Menu does

Recent Menu is a small tool living in your menu bar. It gives you access to a configurable list of recently accessed items (i.e., files and folders) on your computer. It finds accessed items even if it wasn't running at the time the items were accessed. Recent Menu is similar to Apple's Finder app. However, it doesn't show files and folders in their hierarchical order but sorted by the time they were accessed. While this is quite similar to a built-in functionality of OS X, in addition Recent Menu gives you the possibility to define custom filters for file types or file names. The idea behind Recent Menu is that files and folders you have recently used are likely to be used again soon and that Recent Menu can thereby facilitate finding these items.

 

When you launch Recent Menu, there is normally no application icon in the dock menu (unless you decide to keep Recent Menu in the dock after installing it from the Mac App Store). Instead, you will notice a new icon resembling the app icon () in the menu bar at the upper right corner of your screen. Click on this icon to access the features of Recent Menu. The main menu appearing gives you access to the configurable recent items list:

List of recently used files and folders

The list of recently used items shows files and folders you have accessed on your computer, grouped by the custom filters you have defined in the filter settings. The entry of every group are sorted chronologically with those items which have been accessed most recently are at the top of the group. To open a file shown in the list with its standard application, just click on it. To show its location in Finder, hold the command key ⌘ and then click on it.

Note: After Recent Menu has been started and after filter preferences have been updated, Recent Menu needs a moment to update the list of recently used items. Until that is done, Recent Menu will show a waiting notice.
How Recent Menu Works

Recent Menu uses data provided by Spotlight, a OS X system service. Inter alia, Spotlight logs access to (almost) every file and folder on your local computer. Recent Menu links these data with the filter settings to create the list of recently accessed items.

Note: Recent Menu cannot monitor items that are not located on your local computer but which are stored in an internet or network location.