Is there a way to delete Recents from the Safari share button?

[medgirl2001]

In Yosemite, Safari has a button to share websites to Email, Messages, Social Media, etc. If you email a site/link to someone, the recipient's name then appears under "Recents" from that button. Is there a way to clear recents? Clearing history/cookies doesn't seem to do it. Neither does clearing Previous Recipients in Mail.

 

[GrumpyTrucker]

Since it seems to be the same list in Finder too I was guessing it's a plist somewhere. Unfortunately there's more than a couple of plists.

I found one reference in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sharekit.recents.plist

but deleting this plist and restarting Safari didn't clear the menu. Maybe it needs a log off/on to do it but I've got too much going on to try that. As usual though, if you're going to mess with plists etc make sure you have a backup, just in case.

 

[Simplicated]

For some reason, deletion of plist files (at least the ones I've tried) doesn't have any effect on the apps anymore in Yosemite. I'm assuming that they're now either heavily cached or some protection mechanism has been introduced to restore the plists the moment they're deleted.

Edit: Yes there is indeed more robust caching now. Read this Stack Overflow question for more. Basically you need to type

killall -u $USER cfprefsd

in Terminal for changes to take effect.

 

[GrumpyTrucker]

For some reason, deletion of plist files (at least the ones I've tried) doesn't have any effect on the apps anymore in Yosemite. I'm assuming that they're now either heavily cached or some protection mechanism has been introduced to restore the plists the moment they're deleted.

Edit: Yes there is indeed more robust caching now. Read http://this Stack Overflow question for more.

Link don't work

Seems daft to not to be able to reset that recents list though. I might have someone listed in it that I only interacted with a couple of times and might never do again. I'm guessing (hoping?) it only keeps a few in there and doesn't just keep growing as time goes on.

Oh, and if deleting plist files doesn't make any difference now, that's quite a few helpful internet articles that are going to need rewriting. How many times have we read "delete the plist file and it should fix it"?

 

[medgirl2001]

It would be good if there is a plist file that can be deleted to clear the recents, but it seems strange that there isn't a regular way to do it.

 

[Simplicated]

Link don't work

Seems daft to not to be able to reset that recents list though. I might have someone listed in it that I only interacted with a couple of times and might never do again. I'm guessing (hoping?) it only keeps a few in there and doesn't just keep growing as time goes on.

Oh, and if deleting plist files doesn't make any difference now, that's quite a few helpful internet articles that are going to need rewriting. How many times have we read "delete the plist file and it should fix it"?

Sorry about that, just fixed the link.

 

[GrumpyTrucker]

Sorry about that, just fixed the link.

Thanks. Interesting read. So we need to be messing about with Terminal with killall or defaults commands just to wipe a prefs file? That's really gonna make troubleshooting some stuff a bit harder. Mate of mine has been using Macs longer than I have and he still won't go near the terminal unless he absolutely has to. Not even for a killall Dock to unstick that.

 

[medgirl2001]

Regarding the Recents menu, someone on the Apple discussion boards said the relevant file to delete is com.apple.sharekit.recents.plist in the Preferences folder. Deleting that and rebooting the computer did clear the Recents. Of course sharing again by email, messages, etc. makes it return.

I did find that the first time I deleted it, I wasn't able to access anything under "More" for the Share button. Adding something to the reading list seemed to reset that. That only happened once.