How to Create a New Text File on Mac Instantly

Right-click on the desktop in Windows and you get New → Text Document. Do the same on a Mac and you get “New Folder”. That’s it. Forty years in, macOS still has no built-in way to create an empty text file from Finder.

It’s a small thing that turns into a real friction when you do it ten times a day — stash an API response, save a snippet, jot a note you’ll actually keep. Here are four ways to fix it, from zero setup to one click.

Why Finder has no “New File” command

This isn’t an oversight so much as a philosophy. macOS treats documents as things apps create, not things the filesystem creates. A file’s type comes from the app that owns it, so Apple’s answer to “make a new text file” has always been “open the text app and save.” Windows takes the opposite view: the shell creates an empty file, and you decide later what opens it.

Neither is wrong, but the Apple version means an empty scratch file requires launching something. Everything below is a way around that.

Method 1: TextEdit (with one setting you must change)

TextEdit is already on your Mac, and ⌘N gives you a new document. The trap is that TextEdit defaults to rich text, so “save as .txt” produces RTF markup or nags you about format conversion — useless for code or config.

Fix it once:

1. Open TextEdit and go to Settings (⌘,).
2. Under New Document, choose Plain text instead of Rich text.
3. While you’re there, turn off Smart quotes and Smart dashes under the Options.

That last step matters more than it sounds. Smart quotes silently replace " with " and ", which will break every piece of JSON, YAML, and shell script you ever paste through TextEdit. If you have ever wondered why a config file “looked fine” and still failed to parse, this is often why.

Good for: notes and quick edits with zero installation. Cost: launching an app and a Save dialog for every file.

Method 2: Terminal one-liners

If a terminal is already open, this is the fastest route in existence:

touch notes.txt          # empty file
pbpaste > snippet.json   # clipboard straight to a file
echo "hello" > note.md   # a file with content
open -e notes.txt        # open it in TextEdit

pbpaste is the one worth memorizing. It writes the clipboard to stdout, so pbpaste > file captures whatever you just copied without opening an editor at all.

You can go further and put a function in your ~/.zshrc:

# scratch <name> — make a file, open it in your editor
scratch() { local f="${1:-scratch-$(date +%s).txt}"; touch "$f"; open -e "$f"; }

Good for: anyone already living in a terminal. Cost: you have to be in the right directory, and it does nothing for you in Finder.

Method 3: A Finder Quick Action (the real “New File” command)

This is the closest you’ll get to the Windows behavior, and it’s free. You’re building a Quick Action that appears in Finder’s right-click menu.

1. Open Automator and create a new Quick Action.
2. Set Workflow receives to files or folders in Finder.
3. Add a Run Shell Script action.
4. Set Pass input to as arguments.
5. Use this script:

for d in "$@"; do
  [ -d "$d" ] || d=$(dirname "$d")
  f="$d/untitled.txt"
  i=2
  while [ -e "$f" ]; do f="$d/untitled $i.txt"; i=$((i+1)); done
  touch "$f"
done

6. Save it as New Text File.

Now right-clicking a folder in Finder offers Quick Actions → New Text File. The while loop means clicking it repeatedly gives you untitled 2.txt, untitled 3.txt, and so on, instead of silently doing nothing.

Good for: people who work in Finder and want the Windows behavior. Cost: ten minutes of setup, and it creates an empty file — you still open it to type.

Method 4: A menu bar app

The methods above all share one shape: create a file, then open it, then paste, then save. The order can be inverted — pick a type, get an editor immediately with your clipboard already in it, and choose where it lands only when you save.

That’s what I built Effunde to do, so weigh this accordingly. Click the menu bar icon, choose Markdown or JSON or Shell or any of the twelve built-in types, and a small editor drops down with your clipboard already pasted. Pasted code gets run through Prettier on arrival, so a minified JSON blob lands readable. Then Save As, anywhere.

Good for: frequent scratch files, especially with content already on the clipboard. Cost: $1.99, and it’s another menu bar item.

Which one to actually use

Method	Setup	Speed per file	Works from Finder
TextEdit	1 min (plain text setting)	Slow	No
Terminal	None	Fastest, if already open	No
Quick Action	~10 min	Fast, empty file only	Yes
Menu bar app	Install	Fast, content included	Anywhere

If you only need this occasionally, fix TextEdit’s plain-text setting and stop there — that’s genuinely enough, and it costs nothing. If you’re in a terminal all day, pbpaste > file is unbeatable and you don’t need anything else. The Quick Action is the right answer if your objection is specifically that Finder can’t do it.

The one case worth paying for is the one where you’re pasting something in ten times a day and the ceremony is the whole cost.