I'm told that one of things Switchers miss when they come over from the dark side is the ability to create new files simply by right-clicking and choosing a type from the "New" submenu in Windows Explorer (their Finder equivalent). For those people, Ankur Kothari (aka the Vacuous Virtuous), has a nice solution using everybody's favorite Mac utility: Quicksilver. Basically Alcor (the Quicksilver developer) has included a default action "Make New" which is not usable without a little setup. What you need to do is create a folder called "Templates" in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver. In that folder you just add files of the sort you create on a regular basis, e.g. Word Documents, text documents, spreadsheets, whatever.
Now whenever you want to create a new file of that sort, just start Quicksilver and navigate to the directory where you want the file to be created (e.g the Documents folder as above), tab and select the "Make New" action, then tab to the third pane and select the file type from the dropdown list (you see above I've created two document types, a Markdown document in TextMate and a rich text document in TextEdit). Hit return, and the appropriate application will start up with an untitled document ready to go. But it gets even better, the documents you save in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Templates do not have to be blank. Rather, as you might expect, they can be templates what already have some content (e.g. headers or formatting). This is such a handy trick that even non-Switchers may find it useful.
[Via MacBreak Weekly]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-26-2007 @ 2:02PM
Jussi Pennanen said...
Also worth checking out is NuFile, http://growlichat.com/NuFile.php if you need to create blank files the same way as you would in Windows...
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3-26-2007 @ 2:30PM
Karl Childers said...
I noticed this came from Macbreak weekly. Anyone know what happened to Macbreak the videos?
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3-26-2007 @ 3:34PM
angle in flames said...
this is just funny, when I read this article I just had to laugh because this "tip" is way too complicated if you compare it to the dark side. Mind you, I am an addicted macuser since six years now.
My humble opinion: forget about this article (and Quicksilver, too; Launchbar is by far superior = faster) and use NuFile instead - I just tried it and it rocks! 2 Mouseklicks, that's the way :=)
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3-26-2007 @ 4:37PM
Mat Lu said...
@3; Never! Quicksilver slays all other keyboard launchers in its path (seriously, though, QS is much more powerful than LB once you learn it). Second, it's not that complicated once it's set up. The setup is the only mildly complicated part. Thirdly, as Matt so aptly says: 2 mouse clicks are 2 too many.
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3-26-2007 @ 4:55PM
Matt Meyers said...
2 mouse clicks are 2 too many!
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3-26-2007 @ 7:39PM
Don Parr said...
What I truly appreciate about this tip is the fact that my template files are safely out of harms way. What I mean is, by implementing this tip (which I have), I can rest easy knowing a “new file” will be created in my documents folder leaving my template file unchanged and ready for the next use - very cool. Thanks so much for sharing this tip! Yes, the setup did take a couple of minutes, but it’s done and I have 3 template files safely tucked away in ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Templates and additional files can be added at any time.
I’ll not extoll the virtues of Quicksilver, one either gets it or they don’t. Suffice it to say, in my opinion, Quicksilver is a Gold Mine, provided one is willing to dig (just a little).
Once again, thank you so much for sharing this tip!
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3-26-2007 @ 11:13PM
Jason said...
if you like the terminal, you can just do 'touch foo.txt', though if you like the terminal, you already knew that.
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3-27-2007 @ 8:54AM
James said...
Something that's really nice about this tip is that you can also create folders inside the Template folder. When you select one of these subfolders from the list, Quicksilver will drop it into the target folder then reselect it ready for you to rename. I've used it to create a basic template for websites, all ready to be dropped into new projects, with all the CSS and javascript in place and already included into the HTML template. Very slick.
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