Allow more recently opened experiments

No. If anything, the opposite. I am happy with seeing only a handful of most recent. A more useful method for me to find any Igor Pro experiment beyond the last few most recent on macOS is to pull up my saved smart search at the Finder level that collects all .pxp files sorted by date last opened (or name or other depending on need). Eventually I anticipate that I should simply be able to say "computer, open my Igor Pro experiment on nanoparticle film analysis from three weeks ago", and my Apple Intelligence assistant will do it for me. ;-)

In any case, should things go in a direction to increase the number of most recent experiments in the list, I'd hope for a preference setting to define the upper limit, e.g. as 10, 20, 50, 100 ... and so on. Otherwise,, I would almost prefer having a way to categorize (tag) experiments and having an experiment browser that allows one to select an experiment from views in the category sets.

I also would not necessary be in favor of increasing the recent experiments list (as JJ mentioned, the the search is better). But I have a related request: Accumulate the recent experiments list from ALL open Igor sessions. I often work in multiple session at the same time, but often see that the list has either not been updated at all when I close the (in time) first session last, or some entries are missing.

I have to work on Windows, so any fancy Mac thing is not available.

I am also on Windows, but instead of the abysmal Windows search function I use an additional tool called Everything, which provides instant, system-wide search similar to the finder on Mac. Maybe you give this a try. I find almost everything I need in one second with this tool.

chozo wrote:

I also would not necessary be in favor of increasing the recent experiments list (as JJ mentioned, the the search is better). But I have a related request: Accumulate the recent experiments list from ALL open Igor sessions. I often work in multiple session at the same time, but often see that the list has either not been updated at all when I close the (in time) first session last, or some entries are missing.

IIRC, the list of recent files/experiments is loaded when Igor starts and saved when it quits. So each instance of Igor will have a list of recent files/experiments that was in effect the last time an instance of that same major version quit, and the recent files/experiments that are saved when the last instance of Igor quits will overwrite any settings saved when previous instances quit. Most preferences in Igor work this way.

The alternative would be to save the preference to disk every time they are written to by any instance of Igor, and read the preference from disk every time any instance of Igor needs to read them. In the case of the recent files/experiments lists, since those are menus that means that every time menus are updated (this happens very frequently) Igor would need to load the settings from disk. Doing so could have performance implications.

I'm also not sure I would like more recent experiments.  What would be nice is if instead of the large list, there was another level of grouping, either by time or name.  For example, you could have lists of experiments opened today, yesterday, last week, and older.

@Adam

I see. I already anticipated that it would not be that easy. The current situation is fine for me. If the recent experiments list was a separate setting, and would be only saved upon closing the Igor instance, then the performance impact could probably be kept at bay.