Removing individual items from the "Recent Items" list

In Mac OS X, Apple provides access to recently accessed items through the Apple menu's "Recent Items" submenu. This list keeps track of recently accessed documents, servers, and applications that can be quickly accessed from this menu. While there is an option to clear the menu, there may be times when you may want to keep most of the items and only remove those in a category or only one item.

Apple discussion poster "Michael King" writes:

"I'd like to be able to delete things from the Recent Items... list in the Apple menu, eg, the last version of an app that has a different name from the new version so the old one is still in the list even tho it's been purged from the Trash.

I've tried the obvious like the delete key, and searching for a folder where those aliases are kept, but no luck. Do I just have to open some other apps to purge the old ones?"

The items in this menu are kept in a plist file called "com.apple.recentitems.plist" that is located in each users' /username/Library/Preferences/ folder. As with many Apple plist files, the data in this XML file are organized in tags that can be most easily managed using Apple's plist editor (available with the free developer tools), but can also be done with any standard text editor.

Open the plist file in the editor of your choice, and you can see the layout showing "Applications", "Documents," "Hosts," and "Servers" categories, all defined by their own "" tags. In each of these there is a "CustomListItems" category (defined as an array) that contains each of the recent items for that category. Find the name of the recent item and remove the whole entry for the item (all the contents between the "" and "" tags for the item, including the tags themselves).