Tuesday, January 29, 2013

f18 - no nautilus option for new document

In the Nautilus file manager in Fedora 18, unlike in most file managers, there's no handy option for creating a new, blank text document. What's up with that? You right-click inside a directory and you see something like this:



There is a way to add an option for a new document, though. You just have to add a blank text file inside the ~/Templates directory. You can do that with your favorite text editor, or you can quickly do it from the command line. Here's how I did it:

steve[~]$ cd Templates/
steve[~/Templates]$ touch BlankTextDoc

Then, you get something like this when you right-click inside a directory in Nautilus:


I found that if you then delete the empty text file from ~/Templates, you lose the "New Document" entry in the right-click menu.

1 comment:

jaredmorgs said...

Thanks for the post about this. I was rather confused as to why I had lost functionality from Fedora 17.

While I wanted to execute
[Templates] $ touch "GNOME Usability Fail (or New Text File)" it seemed a bit long. I just went for "New Text File" instead. ;)