Doing this in Windows 10 isn’t hard, and you actually have two different ways to do it, depending on the version of the operating system running on your computer.įirst and foremost, you can do so from the Settings screen by following this path: Settings > Personalization > Start > Show recently opened items in Jump Lists on Start or the taskbar and in File Explorer Quick AccessĬlicking the toggle should take care of the whole thing for you and a system reboot is not required to apply the changes.Īnd then, you can rely on the Group Policy Editor to disable jump lists with a dedicated policy. If jump lists aren’t your cup of tea in the first place, you can simply disable the feature altogether. This one comes down to browsing to the following location and deleting all files in the folder – this will remove absolutely all jump lists for all apps on your device you can technically remove just one to clear all jump lists for a specific app, but given they use highly-complex names, it’s pretty difficult to tell which one belongs to what app: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations
Needless to say, this clearly isn’t the most convenient solution if you want to remove more than a handful of items or clear the jump lists for all apps on your computer, in which case you can use a second method. Right-clicking an application pinned to the taskbar launches this so-called jump list, letting you access some documents, locations, pages, or anything else that is supported by the app itself much faster.įor example, the jump lists of Microsoft Word display the most recent documents you’ve worked on, so you can technically open one of these files quicker because you eliminate the step of launching the app first or navigating to its location.Ĭlearing the jump lists isn’t necessarily the most difficult thing to do, but it’s not very intuitive either.įor example, removing just one entry in the jump list can be done by following the next steps: Right-click taskbar icon to launch jump list > Right-click jump list item > Remove from this list Jump lists are, in essence, a helpful feature. I don’t know about you, but while I do find jump lists in Windows 10 useful, they something become rather annoying, as they might disclose information that I may otherwise not reveal to everyone looking into my laptop.