Recent files auto-removal of not-found ...

In multiple situations it’s inappropriate to automatically remove not-found files from the Recent Files list. Just some examples I’ve experienced myself:

  1. Sometimes the file may be on a temporarily-unavailable network share.
  2. Sometimes the user may have moved/renamed a folder, and needs the original name for reference.
  3. Other users may just want the recent file history without Blender deciding to clean it up.

I believe a less opinion-imposing alternative, and more-ideal default (“smarter” than other software), would be to:

  1. Keep a count of failed opens
  2. Do not delete the file from the list on the first failure
  3. If the user tries again, any time, the fail count will now be >=2, so pop up a dialog, “This file was not found {n} times. Remove from recent files list?”

The above would require the meta data stored in the recent files list. A backwards-compatible method could use # commented lines (or whatever), with the meta-data in it. (Perhaps other meta data could also be useful for recent files, like last open date, count of opens, etc. Things that could allow for smarter project-listing dialogs. Maybe you’ve worked on a project 100 times, but it’s not in the last {recent_files_count}, it could be retained as one of the Favorite Projects. The meta-data would be forward-compatible with new features, but perhaps a #comment hack may not be the best solution in that case. Also, how do we handle newlines in the recent-files.txt? I’ve not looked into that. We could examine if it were a plain [old] format, or a new format with each file’s info on one line:
path=/path/foo.blend,openfails=3,opens=5,mtime={datetime},pin=false
path=/path/mainproject.blend,openfails=0,opens=150,mtime={datetime},pin=true,favorite=true?,category=3d-Printing

Alternatively, have auto-remove be a user-preference. :slight_smile:
(This wouldn’t allow for “favorites” (pinning?)

(I also added “Category”, but I think we’d probably not want to get that elaborate, leaving that organization to the user in their own filesystem.)

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I don’t know which version it was introduced in but in 3.0 I think your concerns have been addressed in that recent files that are missing are now greyed out in the recent files list and appear to remain there until you elect to reset the recent files list.