Pages does not allow for unlimited number of 'Open Recents'

How to configure how many recents?

Instructions in second paragraph of my post.

Does this mean 'Open Recents' is inclusive but not exclusive to that number of 50?

The size of that Open Recents menu will depend on your selection, with 50 being the maximum.

Good solution for finding Pages documents using < and > typographical symbols. Is there a hotkey for this?

No. Spotlight does not take keyboard shortcuts for the <, >, and - operators. Manually entered.

The Open Recents sub-menu is a first in, last out replacement stack that you can configure how many recents appear in that sub-menu. Before you embark on the second paragraph, save your open document and quit Pages.

In macOS Ventura Settings > Desktop & Dock, there is a selector for Recent documents, applications, and servers. The extremes are None, or 50 as the Max. On macOS Monterey and earlier, the same configuration setting is in System Preferences > General.

Pages documents that are removed from the system remain in the Recents stack until they are replaced by newer

entries.

If you open a Terminal window and in its search field, you enter the following syntax, it will find Pages documents prior (<), after (>), or between (-) dates. There is one Spotlight date format.

kind:pages created:<01/18/2023
kind:pages created:>01/01/2023
kind:pages created:09/01/2022-01/18/2023
kind:pages font:cormorant

The latter will find any Pages document that included the custom installed OpenType Postscript Cormorant Garamond font in it.





You are restricted to 50 max open recent items. As more recent documents are opened and saved, the oldest documents on the list of 50 will be replaced.

If you want to find n-tuple Pages documents > 50 wherever they may be on your Mac, use the Finder Window search field choices as I suggested earlier to narrow your search results.

Jumping from Finder to the Terminal just complicates things if you are not comfortable in the Terminal. Spotlight can be used in the Terminal with the mdfind command and a knowledge of Spotlight syntax different from what I shared earlier. Even the Zsh shell would let you find Pages documents for a given timeframe and then restrict the number of documents it returned to you.

In the Zsh shell (Terminal) you can retrieve all Pages documents that were modified in the last 4 weeks sorted by their last access date and only ask for the two most recent:

for f in ~/Desktop/*.pages(.Nmw-4oa[1,2]);
do
   print "${f}"
done



If you have Pages selected in Ventura's Settings > username > iCloud > iCloud Drive > Options, then Pages by default will save to that Pages folder on iCloud Drive. Since I do not have a new Mac with a first ever Pages installation, I cannot test where it would otherwise save by default. Pages is designed to remember the last saved location (across multiple documents) until you manually change that to another save location.

Depending on what you did when you initially setup that Mac Studio, your Documents and Desktop folders may be stored on iCloud, or local to your Mac, and that may have a bearing on Pages save behavior too. I always choose local drive.