Add Your Document Templates to GNOME
GNOME has a menu of document templates in its file browser. It seems to have been forgotten, unless you add some templates yourself the menu will only ever display “No templates installed”.
Document templates are available in the Create Document menu, which can be
accessed by right-clicking in the Nautilus file browser or opening its File
menu.
There’s not much too adding a new template, just add any files you want as
templates to the ~/Templates folder. Give the files a descriptive name because
the file extension is not displayed in the menu. If GNOME can recognize the
template’s file type it will display the proper icon in the menu as well.
Templates can also be organized into folders.
Unlike other operating systems Linux does not use file extensions to identify file types. So you if want your templates to open in the right application when double-clicked, you may have to open the application and save a blank document so Linux will recognize the file as the right type.
If you do HTML programming, one use for this feature is to have templates for HTML documents. Instead of typing up the basic tags or copying a template from webstandards.org every time you create a new HTML document, you can use a template.
Archived Comments
Bradlee
This is a great tip, and one that took me quite a while to figure out on my own. Thanks for giving the Ubuntu community a head start with all your great tips!
dakira
How does Gnome know that it has to look at the ~/Templates folder? I mean.. if you use another language it has a different name. So the question is: where does Gnome save this setting?
Dirk Gently
I like this tip, thanks alot.
Yes Linux uses mime types very very close to Mac OS 9 way of doing it (but alot better). This doesn’t seem quite in line with Gnome HIG though as system settings or in the case, local system settings should be able to be viewed. I personally believe that folder should be in ~/.templates or ~/.gnome2/templates.
Chonnawonga
dakira,
gedit ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs
Edit this line: XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR=“$HOME/”
anon
I think this is a freedesktop standard ?
so the gnome HIG wouldn’t matter because freedesktop takes precedence ?
right ?
Johannes
Hello!
Thanks for this article! I have used it on my website. I hope this is ok.
All the best,
Johannes
Online gambling and betting casino
I’ll take this tip even further by saying that you can also categorize your templates by putting them in sub directories, like Office(for Open Office.org), Development(Shell scripts, C/C++, Python, etc), and Internet(HTML and XML).
Joe Marinaccio
Thank you! Getting ready to get the context menu set up right now. Thanks again.
Raffaele
Hi, great tip. Do you know how to expand the box? It shows no more then 30
items, I have 70 templates, and all for Writer.
Thanks
toomuchcaffiene
Interesting tip… thanks!