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How to Make TextEdit Directly Open a New Empty Document on Mac
With Supercharge
- Open the settings of Supercharge, and click “Tweaks”.
- In the “TextEdit” section, turn on “Open blank document instead of file picker on launch”. Supercharge asks for Full Disk Access, as it needs it to change a hidden setting of another app.
- If TextEdit is open, let Supercharge restart it.
- Open TextEdit. A blank document opens.
To open a file, choose “File › Open” in TextEdit, as before.
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- Platform
- macOS
- Requires
- macOS 26.4 or later
- Released
- September 2024
- Privacy
- No personal data collected
- Updated
- September 2026
- Version
- 1.30.1
- Size
- 16 MB
- Gumroad rating
- 5.0/5 (284 ratings)
Without an app
Each time: In the dialog, click “New Document” at the bottom left, or choose “File › New”. Apple’s instructions.
Always: Quit TextEdit, and run this command in the Terminal app:
defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false
To get the dialog back, run defaults delete com.
The command changes the same setting as Supercharge. Supercharge needs Full Disk Access to change it, so Terminal can need the same access before the command works. If you only want a place for quick notes, see how to take quick notes on Mac.