recent items lists empty

Hello

In more and more apps (Preview, TextEdit, Finder, InDesign … ), the recent items (or open recent … ) lists keep showing as empty. Sometimes a restart fixes that, sometimes it does not. I read that having ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist created anew might help, but that doesn’t seem to apply to El Capitan (as there is no such file on my mac).

Any idea?

Thanks!