How to remove a file from oldfile list - or how to avoid a file from being added to oldfiles when visited?

Question

I'm using a plugin called startscreen to customize my start screen. The problem is that whenever I enter vim the startscreen will be added to the oldfiles list. How can I avoid this. Is there any command to remove the current buffer or a certain buffer from the oldfiles?

For the startscreen buffer: echo &buftype gives nofile

EDIT:

It appears that the vim's oldfiles is different with the telescope plugin. As B Layer mentioned in the comments, telescope adds some buffers (whether from :buffer or the current buffer) to its oldfile built-in function.

I managed to fix this by defining a custom oldfile function, named old_files, which passes certain arguments to the built-in oldfile function.

local M = {}

function M.old_files()
  local fileopts = {}
  fileopts.file_ignore_patterns = {
    "splash.txt",
  }
  require("telescope.builtin").oldfiles(fileopts)
end

As argument, I simply told telescope to ignore a file name pattern when listing the oldfiles by passing fileopt object as argument to built-in oldfiles. From there, I can use this function in a binding.

neovim 0.5 -- linux

Answer 1

There's no way to really avoid the file getting in the list, AFAIK, but you can remove files after the fact.

:oldfiles is fed from the Vim variable v:oldfiles. This is just a standard Vim list so you can edit it.

Let's say the file you want to remove has file path/name /foo/bar/startscreen. Then do this...

:call filter(v:oldfiles, 'v:val !=# "/foo/bar/startscreen"')

The way filter works is it goes through each element of the list provided in the first param and does the test provided in the second param. If that evaluates to 0 (false) that element is removed from the list.