I Can Comment On StackOverflow!

Every once in a while, I set a goal to answer coding questions on someone's platform. It isn’t a huge initiative and I don’t spend a lot of time doing it. I get this urge every so often and circle back around to whatever platform I’m using at the moment. Today, I found myself back on StackOverflow.

😱 I started off looking for a way to remove my Recent list for Chrome. I found a couple of articles, including this guy Aseem who did a great job explaining that my beef wasn’t with Chrome, it was with Windows 10. He describes how Recent items are added to this list.

I discovered that this is easy to clear by turning it off and then back on. However, you have to turn it off/on for Windows 10 as a whole. This means that as of July 2, 2020, you cannot select individual applications to clear and my objective was to only clear it for Chrome. I really like my recent list for Visual Studio Code.

Location of Jump Lists

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations

Now, I know exactly where these lists are stored. I’ll just go delete them.

Windows AutomaticDestinations Files

Windows 10 AutomaticDestinations files that store the recent list for each program

Not Quite. Once I opened the file in a text editor, I quickly realized that it was unreadable.

Now, I had another question on my hands. How do I read an AutomaticDestinations file? This is the search that led me to the StackOverflow questions, Decrypt/Read/Modify “.automaticDestinations-ms” and/or “.customDestinations-ms”! It is also how I ended up answering questions today and receiving upvotes to earn the “comment everywhere” privilege.

After reading the question, some comments and answers on this question, I had an epitome, which allowed me to quickly discover which one of those files were holding the list for Chrome. View my solution here.

I did not stop there. I went on to answer three (3) more questions and one of them was accepted as the solution within an hour.

Ice Cube with the words Today Was A Good Day

In the words of Ice Cube…