About a week ago, Federico Viticci of MacStories asked whether there was a tool to create a text file in the current Finder folder. I threw something together based on Marc Liyanage’s Open Terminal Here applescript. Long story short, it was a piece of crap but it got picked up by Download Squad and eventually by LifeHacker.
Since it seems there’s some interest in this kind of tool, I created a new, much cleaner version based on code contributed by perlhacker in the Lifehacker comment thread. This version asks you for a filename (instead of creating new.txt) and subsequently opens it in your default .txt-handling application (the old version didn’t).
It’s still an Applescript application and thus by definition open source, so feel free to check my code, edit it to suit your preferences, and share it under your own name. For all intents and purposes, consider it to be under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Do whatever you want with it—sell it even, if you can find someone to buy it—but link back to this page and attribute it to me when you do.
If you’re looking for the link, it’s the title of the post.
UPDATE: Due to a request from zxspectrum, I’ve also created NewRTFHere. Be warned that if you choose a filename that already exists, it will overwrite the old file with a blank file (for reasons I don’t want to get into here, NewTextFileHere doesn’t do that). I’m working on a fix, but having some trouble, so it may be a few days.
If you use both NTFH and NRTFH, I strongly recommend giving one or both a custom icon to make it easy to tell them apart. (If any designers out there want to donate an icon for either or both, I’d love to add one.) Also, if you downloaded NewTextFileHere before 2:20pm, you may want to hit the link for a newer version that adds a cancel button and support for some unusual filenames.
[Updated 08 July 2010.]
