After some further digging into into the issue and with helpful hints from some friendly GTK developers I figured out the problem. It's basically that various GTK event handlers of the vim GTK2 GUI quit the gtk main loop (see the event handlers in src/gui_gtk_x11.c) which implicitly causes GTK to save the recently used files list. I have notified the author of vim.
-- vim-gtk/-gnome use of gtk-filechooser causes recently used files list to be constantly written https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251122 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs