List of Recently Opened Files

Question

If I go to the menu bar and press File I get a list of recently opened files.This would be useful except they are edited and mostly replaced by dots thus making choosing difficult. See the screen shot below. Is it possible to get the non abbreviated list from within mathematica and then open one of the notebooks?

I started looking at Preferences and found the "Recently opened files history length" but could not find more. I could not find this as a previous question but may not have searched exhaustively.

Thanks

Answer 1

This gives the recently opened files as a list of rules:

Lookup[Options@$FrontEnd, NotebooksMenu]

Just the file names:

First /@ Lookup[Options@$FrontEnd, NotebooksMenu]

FileNameJoin instead of FrontEnd`FileName: (only tested on windows)

FileNameJoin[(Append @@ ((First@Last[#])[[;; 2]]))[[2 ;;]]] & /@ Lookup[Options@$FrontEnd, NotebooksMenu]

Answer 2

Try

FE`Evaluate[FEPrivate`GetPopupList["MenuListNotebooksMenu"]]

It works in my machine :)

Then you may try something like this to open the notebooks:

ActionMenu["Open History", 
 Rest@FE`Evaluate[FEPrivate`GetPopupList["MenuListNotebooksMenu"]] /. 
  HoldPattern[a_ -> b_] :> (a :> NotebookOpen[$HomeDirectory <> b])]

---

Edit

The following will open the notebooks, notwithstanding the directory where they are stored:

k[n_] := FrontEndExecute[FrontEndToken["OpenFromNotebooksMenu", n]]

ActionMenu["Open History", 
           MapIndexed[#1 :> Unevaluated@k@#2[[1]] &, 
           Reverse@Rest[FE`Evaluate[FEPrivate`GetPopupList["MenuListNotebooksMenu"]]]
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