Simple question about startup options

Question

This is probably fairly straightforward, but I wasn't able to find it right away. I'd like for Mathematica to display on startup the latest notebook I was working on, and nothing else. No additional old notebooks and no new blank notebook. There is probably an option hiding somewhere to do that, but I wasn't able to find it. Apologies if this is too simple.

Answer 1

R.M beat me but I'll post this anyway for variety.

You can open the last Notebook with:

Options[$FrontEnd, NotebooksMenu][[1, 2, -1, 2, 1]] // NotebookOpen

Methods for preventing the opening of a blank Notebook, for both version 7 and 8 are here:

How do I prevent auto loading of blank notebook at startup?

Answer 2

The list of recently opened notebooks (as shown in File > Open Recent) is saved in the NotebooksMenu option for $FrontEnd, arranged by ascending absolute time (i.e., most recent is last). So the most recent notebook can be opened with:

Last[NotebooksMenu /. Options@$FrontEnd] /. 
    HoldPattern[_ -> {file_, ___}] :> NotebookOpen@file

Some additional related questions that might of interest are:

• How do I prevent auto loading of blank notebook at startup?
• Launch a specific notebook automatically when Mathematica starts