■ Reset or disable xplorer² folder browsing history

Everyone wants a piece of you nowadays, especially Google (it's amazing how much stuff they know about you if you have a gmail account). This gets people rightly concerned about privacy, but one can go too far. It's one thing not wanting the wife to discover where you've been browsing under cover of darkness <g> but what kind of privacy concerns can there be against your file manager? Still every now and then I get the odd customer that wants to erase the folders remembered by xplorer² between sessions. I don't understand the need, but the customer is always right — or you are out of business!

xplorer² remembers a lot of things about your use of the program. Most input boxes (for paths, search texts, etc) have a drop-down history, handy if you reuse the same things over and over again (you even get autocompletion, automatically or by hitting the up-arrow key). Take the addressbar for example, if you expand it you'll see all the folders you've visited recently. It also lists your bookmarked folders and frequently used folders (this is a separate list managed automatically for you, see Go to menu), and some standard folders like shell:downloads for your typing convenience — or rather to save you typing.

What if you don't want all this history baggage? You can just remove these lists from the registry, where xplorer² keeps your settings, but that's a temporary measure — the lists will be repopulated as you continue using the program. The best bet is to disable the creation of these lists using Tools > Options menu (see the pic), setting the History items maintained parameter to 2 (don't set it any lower because it will reset itself to 30).

Setting the history depth to 2 items, means there is going to be only a tiny bit remembered. The bad news is that all the drop-down lists are affected, not just the addressbar. Rename templates, keywords you search for, everything will be forgotten real quick and you'll start typing more. You must consider how much typing is your alleged privacy invasion worth.

This setting doesn't affect bookmarks and other lists under Customize menu (user commands etc). So you will not be totally castrating xplorer² <g> That's why your addressbar will still show plenty of items but they are going to be your bookmarks. If you don't want them showing up either, delete the bookmark(s).

Starting with version 3.5 there is a Clear History button next to the History items maintained setting that quickly clears all browsing history without disabling or restricting the maximum items remembered. For v4.1 and later, setting history items to the minimum value of 2 means that no paths and such settings will be saved (excluding bookmarks).

Like the greek masters recommended, one must always seek the golden mean and avoid extremes. In private browsing may make sense in internet explorer, but you needn't worry about xplorer² too much. Let it do the hard work for you, leave the history setting to the default 30 value. You know it makes sense!

ps. A middle of the road solution is to stop saving settings on exit, from options menu.