July 20th, 2021

Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?

What’s the point of having a New menu anyway? “Why would anybody create a new BMP file by right-clicking an empty space in a folder? You still need a BMP editor to put anything meaningful in there. The same is true for a PowerPoint presentation, and an Access database. Although, creating an empty Access database and then opening it will presumably get you the Access program. But if I want to create a new PowerPoint presentation, I will… um… open PowerPoint.”

Sure, maybe that’s what you do, but that’s not what everybody does.

Not everybody knows that the way to create a new BMP file is to open this program called Paint that is hidden in the Accessories folder of your Start menu. User research shows that for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.¹

In fact, in the Xerox Star (the precursor to our modern GUI interfaces), creating a new document is done by copying an existing one.

For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren’t really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents.

It’s like making a telephone call in the United States. You don’t think about which telecommunications company serves that number. You just dial the number and let the telephone network figure out which telecommunications company is responsible for that number. You don’t really care which company gets used, as long as you get connected.

As other people noted in the comments, having a New menu is handy because it lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.

¹ And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?

Even Unix follows this pattern for process creation! To create a new process, you clone an existing one (fork) and then delete everything inside it (exec).

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Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

29 comments

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  • M. W. · Edited

    I for one hope this function isn't removed because it is MUCH more convenient to create a file in a folder that's already open than to run the program (and wait for it to open if it's a big, bulky, bloated monster), create a new document, then slog through the Save-As dialog to re-navigate to the folder that I already had open (while trying to accidentally save in the wrong folder or accidentally close it...

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  • Gunnar Dalsnes

    Eg. if sharing stuff on eg. Android I will get the choice of what app i want to share with. With same logic it would make sense that New gave a choice of what app I want to use to create and open the new and empty file? I assume in most cases the user will open the new and empty file immediately after, not being happy with just having created an empty file?

  • Pados Károly · Edited

    This was probably a good justification 15-20 years ago, but for a very long time now this method pretty much only works for your office suit documents. For the most common files, your standard program to open images is not an image editor, the standard program to open PDFs is not a PDF editor, and the standard program to open multimedia files is not your DAW or video editor. And so on.

    This explains though why...

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  • Max Strini · Edited

    I always thought of this as:

    Notepad is an app for viewing and editing text files, which contain characters. It lets you delete, change, and move/copy existing characters, and also add (type) new characters.

    Explorer is an app for viewing and editing folders, which contain files. So it makes sense that besides deleting, changing, and moving/copying existing files, it also lets you add (create) new files. 😊

    Maybe not literally true, but a nice mental model to...

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  • Leverette, Jack

    Tangential, but germane—I wonder at least weekly why WinOS lacks a native touch command. (as a native cmd command, system32 exe or even something in PowerShell or pwsh). Just something easy to call on from a shell.

    • Andy Cadley

      You can mimic touch by just setting LastWriteTime on a file in PowerShell. Would be fairly easy to alias it if you do it often enough I suspect.

    • Richard Russell

      I have touch.bat in my path containing:

      @if exist %1 (copy /b %1+ > NUL) else (copy NUL %1 > NUL)
      

      which handles both creating an empty file and updating the timestamp on an existing file.

    • Miguel Hernandez

      I’ve used copy con file.txt. Not as easy as touch and not scriptable since it requires ctrl+z to save the empty file.

      • Andrä Hubl

        Use

        copy nul file.txt
      • Neil Rashbrook

        Interestingly this didn’t work with COMMAND.COM which would just say “0 file(s) copied.”; instead I believe you could use rem > file.txt (note that this doesn’t work for CMD.EXE).

      • M. W.

        REM doesn’t work, it comments out the redirection, but REN will work.

  • M. C. Battilana

    I like the "that's not what everybody does" thinking.

    By that logic, why not restore the beloved Recent Items entry in the Start menu? You could even fix it, by allowing Open File location to work even if the file was renamed (after all, it is the location you want to access). Sure, you now have something similar on a per-app basis. But that's not what everybody does :)

    And the beloved Quick Launch Toolbar also had...

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  • Semi Essessi

    As a programmer I use this constantly. VS code handles making new files OK… But making a new file in VS proper is so easy to get wrong that I never use it to make new files.

    I’ve worked at a few places where there is a strong guideline to never create files with VS due to the bad default locations and poor handling of additions to the project and filter files.

  • Mike Morrison

    "As other people noted in the comments, having a New menu is handy because it lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started." That may work for a document-centric view of the world, but for other viewpoints, that process doesn't make sense. Personall,y I don't see the point in navigating...

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    • M. W.

      You're assuming that you're navigating to the folder in order to make a new file. In most cases, you'd already have the folder open for other reasons like organizing or processing files and then create a new one in there while you already have it open. Moreover, it's much easier to navigate to a folder in the File Explorer than it is to navigate to a folder in the Save As dialog (even though they're—usually—essentially...

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      • Mike Morrison

        "You’re assuming that you’re navigating to the folder in order to make a new file." I was replying to Raymond's assertion about users' workflows and "getting back to where you started" when using save-as in an app. Maybe you do have your target folder open in a window when working in an editor app. I personally don't, but I'm not here to advocate my own way or working as the One True...

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  • Flux

    Apparently, things have changed. Windows 11 has gotten rid of the New menu. A Microsoft blog post says the Windows development team is disposing of the unused context menu items based on telemetry.

    • Entegy

      Windows 11 still has the New menu, and it was migrated to the new context menu. I don’t think things migrated to the new context menu would be going away! It’s still early though.

  • Ivan K

    mspaint… and then you have to remember that ctrl^s will overwrite an existing file haha meh.

    • Alexey Badalov · Edited

      What else might you expect it to do? This is what every other application does.

      • Martin Ba

        Not exactly *every* other application:
        The Photo Viewer Applications I know will default to save a copy if you do edits in a photo.
        I’m not faulting mspaint, being the simple bmp editor it is, to just overwrite the current image file on save.
        Seeing as other concurrent programs that display (and edit) images do not necessarily do this, this can be annoying.

      • M. W.

        Indeed, while Ctrl+S might usually be Save, sometimes it’s Save-As, and sometimes it’s something completely different, especially in programs that don’t even create files.