I don’t use GNOME Desktop Environment anymore, but I still use some programs which cooperate with GNOME’s Recent Document list, I don’t need the list and they couldn’t be disabled.

It’s easy to empty the list:

rm ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
# or
rm ~/.recently-used.xbel

If you want to get rid of that, do the following as root:

touch ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
chattr +i ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel
# or
touch ~/.recently-used.xbel
chattr +i ~/.recently-used.xbel

+i means, from chattr(1):

A file with the ‘i’ attribute cannot be modified: it cannot be deleted or renamed, no link can be created to this file and no data can be written to the file. Only the superuser or a process possessing the CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE capability can set or clear this attribute.

Note

In a current session of a program, the files will still appear on the list, but it won’t be on other programs or after restart the program. (2015-07-22T22:10:15Z)