Thursday, 2 January 2020

macos - OS X Snow Leopard: Finder automator item for creating a new text file


how can I create a Finder automaton item that appears in 'Services' for creating a new text file inside a file folder? I use TextMate, so better if the solution is editor-agnostic (rather than using TextEdit).



Answer



The way I do it: I create a dummy text file, and store it in some folder in my documents (this is used as a template for each time the service runs). I then create a workflow (service) as follows:



All you have to do now, is right click the folder you want the new file to be placed in, and select the service created by saving this workflow.


To open the newly created file, you can add an "open Finder items" action in which you would obviously select TextMate rather then TextEdit. To make it editor agnostic, you can tell it to open with its default application, and it will do so.


If asking for the name at runtime is very important to you, you can add a get text action, and assign it to a second variable, then add a rename action after the copy action and say replace text, replacing the name of your template file with the text variable. By default, you can't use text variables in the way I described, but the following post provides a work around of doing so. I know it works under 10.6, and may or may not work under earlier version of OSX.


see here for instructions


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