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.

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

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:

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.