Ubuntu -- disabling Recently Used in file chooser

When designing gtk someone thought it would be a great idea to help the user by providing a list of recently accessed files, and make selecting from them the default. That way you can open one of those, instead of searching for it in the file hierarchy, and so save time. But this doesn't work for a number of reasons. First, the user can't see which version of the file is being offered, just its name. Not knowing where it is located means that when it drops out of the Recently Used list you will have to search for it everywhere. I may have dozens of files with the same name on my disk. That's why we have folders: to distinguish them. Since humans like to organize information hierarchically folders tell us immediately where to find it. Not having that crutch by offering an immediate candidate actually does the user a disservice. In order to get out of the "Recently Used" list you have to click away every single time. It drives me and quite a few other people nuts. I doubt that even the designer of this feature actually uses it.

So in Ubuntu there are two possible strategies for fixing the problem:

1. Disable "Recently Used" altogether
2. Make the default not be Recently Used but Home.

1. looks the most attractive. Unfortunately "Recently Used" is hard-wired into the open file dialog. Short of patching gtk you can't remove it. And I wouldn't recommend patching it, even though you can find one here. Next time you update your system the fix will disappear, if you don't break your current version, which won't be the same as the one assumed by the patch. So, forget this.

2. This is an easy configuration setting. Pity that the designers of gtk didn't also provide a "recentlyused=disabled" option, but whatever. In home .config/gtk-2.0/gtkfilechooser.ini change StartUpMode=recent to StartUpMode=cwd, and then your current working directory or home will be where your heart is. By the way I use Ubuntu 13.10, so this works on the latest system.

If you want to simply prevent files from being tracked in recently used just disable it:

rm ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/recently-used.xbel
touch ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/recently-used.xbel
sudo chattr +i ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/recently-used.xbel

or as someone else suggested, instead of touch-ing and chattr-ing it, just make it a directory:

mkdir ~/.local/share/zeitgeist/recently-used.xbel