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Quicksilver Tip for Switchers: Make New File



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]