Filer For Mac

If you’re a Windows user switching to macOS, you might be missing a very helpful feature present in Microsoft’s File Explorer — the ability to create various types of documents from the context menu, anywhere in the file system browser.

Filer is a Finder extension that brings this feature to macOS in a seamless fashion. It adds a new item to the context menu, allowing you to instantly create text, Office, and iWork documents, as well as various programming-related files.

If you’ve launched the app but can’t see the “New File” option in the context menu, you’ll have to open System Preferences → Extensions, then look for Filer under Added Extensions. Tick the box to enable the extension, and it should now appear in the context menu.

Once you’ve activated the Finder extension, you’ll find a new option at the bottom of the context menu. Whether you are on the desktop or in another folder on your Mac, selecting an item in the submenu will instantly create the selected document.

This app makes it much easier to generate, for instance, a .txt file that can quickly be opened and edited in textEdit or another editor. Without Filer, you would have to first open textEdit, create a new document, format it as plain text, and then save it in the specified location.

As many Windows users will attest, this is a very helpful feature for power users and programmers, and it’s especially handy if you’ve only recently switched to macOS or use both systems.

However, it would be nice to be able to remove certain options from the New File context menu, particularly those for applications that you don’t even have installed. Hopefully this feature will be added in the future.

Filer adds a great quality of life feature to Finder, one that both Windows and long-time Mac users should appreciate. It’s lightweight and completely free, and it just needs some customization to make it a perfect extension.