Cleaning Up the IntelliJ IDEA Clone Repository Dialogue Box

Over the course of the last couple of years, I have checked out dozens of projects with IntelliJ IDEA from various Git repositories. Many of these projects were one-time checkouts, and a slew of them are no longer valid because of domain name changes.

There is no internal mechanism to remove URLs from this dialogue box, and I had not found anything on the Internet on how to do this. I was certain that this information had to be in a configuration file somewhere.

I ran across this page: Directories used by the IDE, which headed me in the correct direction. I eventually found the file I was looking for (using Mac OS X):

~/Library/Preferences/<PRODUCT><VERSION>/options/vcs.xml

This file has a set of <UrlAndUserName> elements that can be individually deleted, as needed:


<application>
  <component name="GitRememberedInputs">
    <option name="visitedUrls">
      <list>
        …
        <UrlAndUserName>
          <option name="url" value="https://github.com/appium/sample-code.git" />
          <option name="userName" value="" />
        </UrlAndUserName>
        …
      </list>
    </option>
    <option name="cloneParentDir" value="$USER_HOME$/IdeaProjects" />
  </component>
</application>
 
Exit IntelliJ IDEA completely, and start it up again. The next time you use the Clone Repository dialogue box (e.g., using "Check out from Version Control" in the Welcome dialogue box), you will see the list reduced to whatever entries you left in the vcs.xml file.

This solution was tested in version 2017.1, and I confirmed the same file location for version 2016.1.