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TRiG
Asked: 2015-06-06 03:57:24 +0800 CST

How can I create a new blank file in an occupied directory?

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I am not experiencing the problem in How to create a new blank file in Nautilus 3.6 and above?, perhaps because I have a newer version of Nautilus.

$ nautilus --version
GNOME nautilus 3.14.2

I can create a blank file very easily in most directories: find some blank space, right click, and select New Document » Empty Document. However, if a folder has enough content to fill the screen, there is no blank space. If I switch to icon mode, there is blank space between the icons, but in list mode there is no blank space anywhere. I don’t recall having this difficulty in the past. Right clicking in list mode used to work. Is there any way I can restore older behaviour?

nautilus

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The easiest method is this keyboard combo: Alt+F, D, E.

    This basically mimics Florian Diesch’s answer: Alt+F opens “File”, D opens “New Documents” and E is for “Empty Document”.

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  2. If there is no blank space you have to use New Document » Empty Document from the File menu.

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  3. The canonical command to create an empty file is indeed touch.

    From the command line, enter touch <filename(including full path)>.

    (Although, beware arguments containing spaces.)

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  4. You could just use the cd command to move to your folder step by step from the terminal and then use any editor to create a file, such as

    cd Desktop/../..
nano a

    This opens "a" file. Just save the file by clicking Ctrl+o and exit with Ctrl+x. Two dots ".." is for parent directory.

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