Question

I found a bunch of people asking this (remove or disable the recent-items submenu) and no answers.

After a bit of investigation … the problem is that Apple has secretly hard-coded that particular menu to always appear – even if you delete it, NSWindowController will silently re-create it.

Answer 1

EDIT: some idiot felt like rewording my answer. Don’t. Or I’ll delete it. As per the reviewer who rejected the edit originally: “This edit is too minor; suggested edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post.” So: don’t.

---

Apple has an official workaround (where they grudgingly accept their mistake in hardcoding the menu):

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa2001/qa1289.html

Seems to work OK, once you setup an IBOutlet:

@property( nonatomic, retain) IBOutlet NSMenu* fileMenu;

…and make sure you have your AppDelegate class represented inside MainWindow.xib (e.g. using a blue-cube Object, and set the class to whatever class your AppDelegate is) … so you can connect the File Menu itself inside the NIB direct to your app-delegate.

EDIT: actually, modification – Apple’s source doesn’t compile correctly with Xcode4, generating a compiler warning. You want this instead:

NSInteger openDocumentMenuItemIndex = [self.fileMenu indexOfItemWithTarget:nil andAction:@selector(openDocument:)];

if (openDocumentMenuItemIndex>=0 &&
    [[self.fileMenu itemAtIndex:openDocumentMenuItemIndex+1] hasSubmenu])
{
    // APPLE'S COMMENT: We'll presume it's the Open Recent menu item, because this is
    // APPLE'S COMMENT: the heuristic that NSDocumentController uses to add it to the
    // APPLE'S COMMENT: File menu
    [self.fileMenu removeItemAtIndex:openDocumentMenuItemIndex+1];
}