Is there a way to make nautilus display the "recently used" files and directories?

Question

Is there a way to make nautilus display the "recently used" files and directories, just like the "open file" dialog does?

Just to make my question clearer, here are two screenshots:

The GTK open file dialog, showing the recently used items:

A nautilus window, which doesn't offer to display recently used items:

EDIT : This has been added as a feature request to Nautilus. Don't hesitate to make your voice heard if you want it to happen!

Answer 1

AFAIK, there is no such thing as "recently used" in Nautilus. There is however GTK feature called "Recent Documents", which you may find in Gnome menu Places -> Recent Documents. To implement it in Nautilus will require the use of GtkRecentManager/GtkRecentChooser

I don't know, why they included it in the open file dialog, but not in Nautilus. GtkRecentChooser is Gtk+ stuff, not Gnome, so any Gtk+ application supports it by default (like in open file dialog). You're right it's intuitive, that Nautilus should have this feature too. Suggest a new feature, maybe? http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=nautilus

Answer 2

You definitely know that, but for the sake of completeness - the Go menu of Nautilus window has the list of locations you recently visited. However, recently accessed files aren't added there - only directories.

So you may navigate to recent files with Places -> Recent Documents (just as sindikat suggested), and to recent directories with Go -> directory_name.