Old documents in Dock

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Timotheus
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Joined: 2007-04-13 07:16:41

Old documents in Dock

Post by Timotheus »

When right-clicking the Nisus icon in the dock, a list of the most recently opened documents should appear.

But in my case the list that appears when doing so, is a list of old, not recently opened documents, completely different from the list that appears under File > Open Recent, which indeed shows the most recently opened documents.

How can I refresh the list that pops up in the dock? Nisus 3.0.1, OS X.12.6.
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martin
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Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by martin »

That is curious, and I'm sorry the list of recent documents is incorrect in the Dock icon's menu. The reason for the stale list of files is almost certainly due to the way Nisus Writer customizes the Open Recent list inside the app itself. There's a variety of reasons we do that, but it shouldn't disrupt the Dock icon's list of recent files. We'll have to take a look and see what we can do. Thanks for letting us know!
NisusUser
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Joined: 2011-01-12 05:32:38

Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by NisusUser »

Yeah, that is strange. I get the same results at Timotheous. I hadn't noticed since I seldom use the list via the Dock icon.
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xiamenese
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Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by xiamenese »

On the other hand, I have just tried by editing a file, making changes to it by running a macro, changing the styles of paragraphs, then shutting down NWP. I normally open all my apps using Spotlight, which also lists the recently opened files, and the newly saved file is listed, and if I open NWP without choosing anything—NWP is set not to open anything automatically on start-up—and then look at the list in the Dock, the newly saved file is on the list.

If you need anything from me, Martin, as I seem to be different to the others, let me know. 2015 MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14.5.

:)

Mark
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martin
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Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by martin »

Thanks to everyone for sharing your experiences and offering to help! I've investigated and the short answer is that I have no idea what's wrong, but there's probably a system bug here.

Apple allows apps to add custom commands to the dock menu (eg: Show Document Manager) but it's mostly controlled by the system. This is easy to see, since the dock menu's list of recent files shows even when an app is not running. The system is solely responsible for populating the menu at that point. Even with Nisus Writer taking over the Open Recent list in the main menu, we appear to be doing everything correctly. We still register documents with the system as they are opened, so those documents can also be recorded by macOS and shown on the dock menu.

In terms of practical advice, have you tried using the menu File > Open Recent > Clear Menu? I had a seriously messed up dock menu:
menu.png
menu.png (174.98 KiB) Viewed 13271 times
First off, the list of recents includes files I haven't opened in a long time. But even more obviously wrong is that the menu items are strangely intermixed. For example, why is the "Options" submenu nestled amongst recent files? Nisus Writer doesn't control any of this. After I used the "Clear Menu" command all my dock menu's problems were gone, and newly opened documents appeared properly in the recents list there.

I should say this behavior naturally could vary between system versions. I'm using Mojave, but I hope this helps you back on older system versions too.
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ScottinPollock
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Joined: 2017-09-11 08:16:47

Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by ScottinPollock »

martin wrote: 2019-05-22 09:11:40have you tried using the menu File > Open Recent > Clear Menu?
I have many times... it never works to clear the dock menu like it does in other apps. I gave up long ago trying to figure it out.

Below is my doc menu from a fresh system install of Hi-C Error and Nisus 2.1.10 (no restores from backup). You can see the "dot" files that I initially edit after installing Nisus. Its been that way for months even though I regularly clear the recents menu.

Image
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ScottinPollock
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Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by ScottinPollock »

Seriously LOL!!!

After my post above, started my MacBook just now and...

Image

And no... today is not my birthday.
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martin
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Re: Old documents in Dock

Post by martin »

I have no idea why the dock menu's recent file list is sometimes so wrong. It's all very strange. I can only assume there are some system bugs here, likely related to old recent file lists. Well, maybe now that you somehow cleaned up your recent file list, it will stay fixed. So far mine has remained correct since I cleared it.

If you do still have trouble you'll probably need to poke around system settings or files. It used to be that macOS stored per-app recent files using the preferences sub-system (ie: NSUserDefaults). Each app would have a separate plist file in your Library folder that held recent file records for that single app. For example, Apple's Numbers app would store its recents in this file:

Code: Select all

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iWork.Numbers.LSSharedFileList.plist
This doesn't appear to be true anymore, at least not on Mojave. A superficial test shows these files are no longer being updated, and Apple seems to have switched to using this folder for storage:

Code: Select all

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments
If anyone wants to try to clear an obstinate recent files listing, then I'd fish around both of these locations and see if there are any files with Nisus Writer's bundle identifiers present. You could try deleting any such files and then rebooting your Mac.

The reboot is likely necessary, since the recent files service runs in the background and may not detect changes to files on disk until it's restarted. In the worst case scenario the recent files service may never respect any manual file deletions. The service could theoretically run continually and recreate the unwanted lists of recent files from its cache in RAM when you shutdown your Mac. How exactly all this interacts is up to Apple.
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