nautilus-create-file

A small Nautilus (GNOME Files) extension that adds Create New File… to the context menu. It opens a native Adwaita dialog where you enter a file name and extension, and creates an empty file in the current folder.

Features

• Entry in the folder background menu, and when a single folder is selected
• Live validation: the Create button stays disabled for empty, invalid or already existing names
• Suggested name new-file.txt with only the stem selected, like renaming in Nautilus
• Asynchronous creation, so slow network mounts don't block Nautilus
• Works with any location GIO can write to, not just local paths
• Translatable via standard gettext (German included)

Requirements

• Nautilus 46 or newer (needs Adw.AlertDialog, libadwaita ≥ 1.5)
• nautilus-python for Nautilus 4.x
  • Fedora: nautilus-python
  • Arch: python-nautilus
  • Debian/Ubuntu: python3-nautilus

Installation

Per user (no build tools needed)

git clone https://github.com/crian/nautilus-create-file.git
cd nautilus-create-file
bash install.sh
nautilus -q

Uninstall with bash install.sh uninstall.

With Meson

meson setup build --prefix="$HOME/.local"   # or --prefix=/usr for a system-wide install
meson install -C build
nautilus -q

Translating

The extension uses plain gettext with the domain nautilus-create-file.

1. Copy po/nautilus-create-file.pot to po/<lang>.po (e.g. po/fr.po).
2. Set "Language: <lang>\n" in the header and fill in the msgstr entries.
3. Add <lang> to po/LINGUAS.
4. Run python3 compile-translations.py to test, or just install again.

Pull requests with new translations are welcome.

If you add or change strings in nautilus-create-file.py, update the template with:

xgettext --from-code=UTF-8 -L Python -k_ -o po/nautilus-create-file.pot nautilus-create-file.py

Known limitations

• The newly created file is not selected afterwards (the Nautilus extension API has no hook for this).

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE.