Remove only specific items from the Recent Items menu on Mac OSX with this simple trick.

Mac OSX (as other main-stream operating systems do) keeps track of the recent items that you have used so you can get back to them easily. It shows you 10 of the most recently used applications, documents and servers by default. You can configure it to show different number of items if you want to see more or less.

To do that go into “System Preferences” > “Appearance“. You can see a “Number of Recent Items” with choices for Applications, Documents and Servers. Adjust the numbers accordingly to your preference.

At times we don’t want the recently used items to show up, for privacy reasons, especially if your Mac can be used by persons other than you. To clear the items you can use the “Clear Menu” option on your Apple menu. That will take care of clearing the entire list. But what if we wanted to keep all the recent applications but wanted to clear only the documents?

Well, it quite simple to clear only a certain group of items from the list. Just go back into the “Appearance” settings and on the “Number of Recent Items” set “None” to the category you want to clear. All the entries on that category will be cleared now. Reset it back to the number of items you want to show up on the list if you want to keep track of your recently used items again.

As you can see above, only the Documents list is cleared out and the Applications list still shows the list of recently used applications.

Even though it’s a simple tip, it might come in handy when in need. I hope you find it useful.