From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

946 Clearing the Illustrator Home screen

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

946 Clearing the Illustrator Home screen

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's techniques. Remember last week when I showed you how to clear the home screen in Photoshop? Oh good old last week. Cause see what I showed you in Photoshop that's not even an option in Illustrator. You can clear the home screen but it's not entirely reliable. Are you psyched yet? Here, let me show you kind of sort of exactly how it works. Alright now, by default, Illustrator remembers the last 20 documents that you've opened and assigns thumbnails to each and every one of them here inside the home screen. If you want to clear those thumbnails, it'd be nice if you could go to the File menu, choose Open recent files, and then choose a clear recent files command like you have in Photoshop. As things stand now, we don't have one inside Illustrator. And so the workaround is to go up to the Edit menu here on the PC, that's going to be the Illustrator menu on the Mac, drop down to the Preferences Command, which is not nearly so low in the menu on the Mac, and then choose this guy right here, File Handling and Clipboard. And now what you want to do is change the number of recent files from 20, as by default to zero, and then click OK. Now initially that has no effect, which is why what you want to do is go up to the File menu and choose the exit command that's going to to be the quit command on the Mac in order to quit the program and then restart the program as I've done here, at which point, you'll see that all of the thumbnails on your home screen have disappeared. Now, what I recommend you do is return to the Edit menu, that's going to be the Illustrator menu on the Mac, drop down to the Preferences Command and once again, choose File handling and clipboard. And now go ahead and take that number of recent files value back up to 20 and then click OK. Now what you want to do is open some files that you want to see here on the home screen and I'm going to do that by going to the File menu and choose browse in Bridge if you prefer, you can just use the open command and I'm going to go ahead and click on one of these thumbnails, shift click on the other, and then go to the File menu and choose the open command in order to open those files here inside Illustrator and now I'm going to close them all which you could do by pressing the keyboard shortcut of Control, Alt, W or command option W on the Mac and by default, that's going to automatically switch you back to the home screen, at which point I will see thumbnails for each and every one of those three documents. Now this technique, as I say, is a workaround. It doesn't work impeccably. Now it works great if you decide to keep the program open, and you continue to open different documents. However, if I were to once again quit the program by choosing the exit or quit command from the File menu, and then you restart the program as I've done here. Notice now if I were to scroll down, I'm not only going to see my last three open documents, but I'm going to see everything that was open before them all the way to 20 documents total. And so you may ask, well, how do I get rid of these thumbnails forever? I just don't want to see them anymore. Well, in that case, what you have to do is once again bring up the Preferences dialog box, which you can do by pressing Control K or Command K on the Mac, then click Reset preferences at which point Illustrator will invite you to restart the program. I'm not going to do that however, because that is a DEFCON solution that's a little more than I want I want to keep my preferences so I'll just go ahead and cancel out. And so those are your options at present anyway, if you want to clear the thumbnails on your home screen here inside Illustrator. Looking forward to next week? So am I. Will still be an Illustrator in which I'll show you a new way to unlock very specific locked objects. Which has long been a weak point in Illustrator and now less weak. Deke's techniques each and every week, keep watching.

Contents