gedit-autoname

gedit-autoname automatically names new files so you don't have to, replacing gedit's "Untitled Document 1" with automatically generated filenames.

• When you open a new window or tab it'll open a file named ~/Desktop/Untitled YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt, instead of the default behavior of opening an unnamed file and requiring you to pick a file name when you try to save it.

  You won't be asked for a filename when you save the file, it'll just save it to ~/Desktop/Untitled YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt.

  You can still use Save As… if you want to rename the file yourself.

  Date and time suffixes are used so the filenames never conflict.

• Gedit's autosaving will be working immediately as soon as you open a new window or tab, so you'll never be at risk of losing any work (normally it doesn't start autosaving an untitled document until you've saved it once manually, and chosen a filename).

  You have to enable autosaving under Preferences → Editor → File Saving. Or better, install my gedit-smart-autosave plugin for faster autosaving.

• When you save a file it will be renamed based on the first line of the file.

  You end up with filenames like ~/Desktop/My Pancake Recipe YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt, so you can tell what the contents of each file are from the filename.

  The title is derived from the first non-blank line of the file, truncated and with non-ASCII characters and extraneous whitespace removed. This works well with headings from markdown and similar markup languages, or simply with files that use the opening line as a title. If your file doesn't contain a title as such then the first line of text usually provides a reasonable preview of the contents.

  This enables a fast plain text note-taking flow: launch gedit (I have gedit --new-window bound to Super + g), type or paste in some notes, save the file (Ctrl + s), quit gedit (Ctrl + q). Each note will be saved with a sensible filename, and you never have to choose a filename yourself. No popup dialogs from gedit either. With gedit-smart-autosave you don't even need the Ctrl + s.

• If the file is empty when you save it, the file will be deleted.

  So you don't end up with empty ~/Desktop/Untitled YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt files lying around.

  You can also cause the plugin to delete a file by opening it, deleting all its contents, saving, and closing the file.

• It will only rename and delete files that match the ~/Desktop/* YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt pattern, so it won't touch files you've named yourself.

Installation

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins
$ git clone https://github.com/seanh/gedit-autoname.git ~/.local/share/gedit/plugins/gedit-autoname

Then in gedit go to Preferences → Plugins and enable the Autoname plugin.

TODO

• When creating a ~/Desktop/Untitled YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.txt file it should check whether the file already exists and append 1, 2 etc to the filename as necessary.

• The directory where new files are created (~/Desktop) should be configurable.