MacOS: Make TextEdit.app open new file on launch

I use TextEdit a lot to format small snippets of text and code when formatting is not a concern for me. One of my biggest annoyances with this tiny application as how that it always opened to the “open file” dialog when I needed to quickly format text. Turns out there is a way to change that!

Open a blank file by default

Rewriting the following line in the Plist file can set the application to open new file by default! Open your terminal and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

Reset to show the open dialog

Running the following command will reset the application back to showing the open dialog when you open the application:

defaults delete com.apple.TextEdit NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile