I often myself trying to save a document to a path for which I happen to have a Finder window already open. Nevertheless, that path routinely DOES NOT show up in the Recent Places listing. This holds even for paths that I haven’t navigated to before, but just moments ago opened a Finder window to. So with that I can be certain the problem isn’t limited list of entries in Recent Places and mine just happening to have fallen off.
Does this make any sense at all? Or is this just an outright bug?
[And yes, I know DefaultFolder advertises that it can do this. It’s also $40. So let’s keep this thread focused on what/why, not DefaultFolder, please and thank you.]
I’ve often been bothered by the same issue. I think the problem is that, in the Save dialog, Recent Places means ‘places that I have recently saved items to’, not ‘places that I have recently visited or am now visiting’.
Fortunately, there is a workaround. If the target folder is visible on the desktop, just drag it into the dialog, and it will now be the target or saving. If the folder is open, drag the icon from the title bar. Because the folder icon may be hidden behind other windows, I often just path-trace starting with a related folder in the list to get to the desired one.
That reminds me of a similar issue I’ve seen with Safari. I sometimes will type a search in the address bar, yielding a Google results page, yet the results page often will not appear in Safari’s history if I try to go back to it after clicking on a search result. I haven’t figured out exactly what triggers it, since sometimes it works as expected.
Often times I’ll have a gazillion overlapping windows even on this 5K 27" so I cannot directly drag the folder into the save dialog. Instead I have to evoke Exposé and go hunt for it. That works of course, it’s just tedious compared to what I would see as the “expected behavior”. But I think your suspicion about what Recent Places refers to could be a likely explanation.
This reminds me of a longstanding bug in every version of Mac OS I can think of: If you open a file from the Finder (say, a .txt file which opens in TextEdit), then look in the application’s File→Open Recent list, the file is not there. Why not? I opened it recently, didn’t I? Apparently the Open Recent list only tracks files opened using that application’s File→Open menu. Silliness!
I tried this with a .txt File and TextEdit.app and, like @xdev, I could not reproduce the behavior you see. I created a brand new file for this purpose to ensure it doesn’t just get listed because I had opened it before. But even with this brand new text file, after launch it immediately showed up in TextEdit’s File > Open Recent… list as well as under > Recent Items. This was on 26.2.