Re: Privacy option?

[Mooffie <mooffie gmail com>]

(Replying to a post in the mailing list archive, so apologies for lack
of threading.)

On May 20, 2016, Toby wrote:
> I usually enable the privacy option on GUI desktop systems / file
> managers, which prevents them from keeping a menu of recently accessed
> files and directories, because I find the feature more troublesome than
> useful.
>
> In plain Bash terminals instead I use a "private window" concept,
> borrowed from web browsers. Whenever I'm about to work on private data I
> type 'unset HISTFILE', after which all following commands typed into that
> window won't be saved in .bash_history

(You can make it so that the Bash spawned under MC does this automatically.)

> Is there a similar option for mc? Either a global option to avoid saving
> activity history (such as recently accessed files, directories, and
> commands) or a temporary switch akin to "private window"?
>
> Otherwise, has anybody come up with some hook or script to do that?
>
> I took a look at the files kept by mc and I found the following:
>
> ~/.local/share/mc/history
> ~/.local/share/mc/filepos
> ~/.cache/mc/Tree
>
> The first is the most troublesome file. I only want to keep the
> [user-fmt-input] and [mini_input] sections there (which are really
> configuration history, rather than activity history) and get rid of
> everything else. The second file contains activity history of recently
> edited files and the third contains the directories browsed using Tree
> view, so they need to go as well.
>
> I just cleaned up those three files and gave them root:root 644
> permissions, which seems to be doing the trick: it keeps them read-only
> with no visible error message. But I'm wondering if there's a better
> option out there.

I don't know if it helps, but MC respects the following environment variables:

XDG_CONFIG_HOME
XDG_DATA_HOME
XDG_CACHE_HOME

Google them. You can create a shell script to launch a "private" MC
that puts all these under ~/.private or whatever.

(I see that MC stores the "Directory hotlist" data in CONFIG, not
DATA. This looks wrong.)

(Tip: you can make your "private" MC use a different skin than the regular one.)