Re-enable ‘New Document’ Option in Ubuntu 18.04

After upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 from Ubuntu 16.04, you may found that the default Nautilus file browser lacks ‘New Document‘ option in its context menu.

To get back the ‘New Document’ option, you can create a empty document in the Templates folder. And here I’m going to show you how.

new-document

While ‘New Document’ option is not available, you need to create a template in command line.

Open terminal via Ctrl+Alt+T keyboard shortcut or by searching for ‘terminal’ from app launcher. When it opens, run command:

touch ~/Templates/Empty\ Document

template-empty-doc

The command creates a document file called Empty Document in user’s Templates folder. After that you can see the New Document -> Empty Document option (see the picture above) by right-clicking blank area in file browser.

You can change ‘Empty Document’ to any words to get other options. Here I use ‘Utitled Document‘ for example, run command in terminal:

touch ~/Templates/Utitled\ Document

So to get the option shown in the picture:

newdoc-untitled

Note that the backslash in the code tells that the space following it is part of the filename since the shell treats whatever comes after a space as a separate argument.

About ml

ml is a part time stay-at-home dad who've been using Ubuntu Desktop for a few years. He writes in the free time and wishes to share some useful tips with Ubuntu beginners and lovers.

12 comments

  1. Not working for me, any idea why? I’ve searched other solutions but all I can find is this one

    • If you are not using english version it might be not “Templates” just go to you home directory and you’ll findout where to put file 🙂

  2. Works great. But now I have two Empty and Untitled document options. How do I remove one of them??

  3. Perfect!

    You can additionally add options for different file types as well.
    eg:
    touch ~/Templates/PyScript.py
    touch ~/Templates/Docx.docx
    touch ~/Templates/Text.txt

    Very useful!!!

  4. That was cool. Thanks 🙂

  5. Ah, makes so much sense. Now I am actually fine with them removing the previous feature.

  6. Hi,
    This one works for me.
    How to remove an entry on the templates?

  7. Strange! I have Ubuntu 18.10 and created the Folder Templates (since i have english installation) + someFile in it. Still the “New Document” context-menu is not showing up :/