Cont.: Reserve the "New Document" submenu even when there's no templates available

[brlin (林博仁(Buo-ren, Lin))]

Previous discussions:

• [Reserve the “New Document” submenu even when there’s no templates available (was: “New Document” submenu support) (#407) · Issues · GNOME / Files · GitLab] [GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/407)
  NOTE: I’m the submitter of this issue
• Bug 687139 – Context menu entry to create a new blank file
• Bringing back the “New Document” button on right click by default - Applications - GNOME Discourse

@@antoniof from https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/407#note_115585

My best idea so far for the empty XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR case, if we really want to show the submenu anyway, would be to provide an “Open Templates folder” action.

 ───────────────────────
|     No templates      |
| --------------------- |
| Open Templates Folder |
 ───────────────────────

But I’m still not sure this is the right way to improve the feature’s discoverability.

I would like to again express my favor for this option.

@ebassi

In any case, this would require a standardisation effort to ensure that applications can find those templates; right now, they only have one directory to check, which means they’d need additional API and logic to go through all the additional template directories.

I would like to ask whether such standardization occurred, and if not, how to push things forward?

[p3732 (Peter Eisenmann)]

I would like to again express my favor for this option.

I agree. Such a solution would also allow moving the templates folder to a less present location, such as ~/.locale/templates. Additionaly, the commonly desired ‘empty file’ option could be included.

I would like to ask whether such standardization occurred, and if not, how to push things forward?

I do not think so. I believe it would need to be done through a freedesktop.org standard in some way. Maybe adding it to https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-user-dirs/ could suffice. (Note that the project does not seem all active)