Hi, I'm using gnome/wheezy and I'm up to date. I hadn't done an update in something like 2 weeks and after doing it today I find that the gedit save dialog (and open dialog) defaults to 'Recently Used'. I'd like it to default to my home directory. I went to the gconf editor looking for an obvious fix but I couldn't find one. I checked this out on another computer following wheezy and the dialog is the same. Is this fixable?

I think it's not possible ... see linux - Changing GEdit's default file open/save path? - Super User and the bug report linked from one of the comments.

I don't know how you got it to stick to the home directory and not follow your recently used directory to start with!

Personal opinion: gnome as a whole is not very much into allowing the user to customise things, and I wouldn't hold my breath for them to address this.

I've had such issues with gnome in the distant past, and it's usually involved fruitless trawling through the user configuration dotfiles, usually fairly lengthy xml files, to try and find out what caused it. In every case I usually ended up deleting the whole ~/.config/<application name> directory, though that is admittedly the mindless approach and gnome configuration seems to be scattered everywhere.

A good test is to create a new user and see if that user has the same problem. If it does then it may be a bug. If it doesn't then it's a config issue and fishing around for the right dotfile is the way forward.

Personal opinion: I prefer Xfce and KDE.

So the funny thing is that I use xsane for my scanner, and the save dialog in xsane is acting exactly like the one in gedit. It defaults to 'Recently Used' which is, in fact, mostly useless. It happens on two machines that I use. Very odd. I would file a bug report but I don't know where to file it. And googling for 'Recently Used' is not helpful.

I've just remembered something about this - I'm almost 90% certain this has nothing to do with gnome or any particular application. There are user settings in your /home/username directory for things like the recent or last opened directory. I managed to break this once by deleting a few dotfiles but I can't remember which. In my case though even VTs were opening at a certain path every time. Have a snoop around in your ~ and also try running the programs in question from the terminal to see if there are any permissions issues involved.

Thanks SecretCode and caravel. So, I typed 'gksu gedit' which opened up gedit in my root account, and when I clicked on my 'save' button I got the same 'Recently Used' listing... which was listing different stuff because I was root then and I never use root to edit with gedit, BUT it shows you that it is acting this way under different accounts. I noted above that I tried this on another laptop, completely separate from this one (also current on wheezy) and the result is the same. I went to the gnome configuration editor, typed in as search criteria 'recent' and also 'used' and made sure I was searching for key names and key values. No luck. Maybe someone out there has better search criteria or an idea about which dot file to focus on. (?)