When launching Script Editor, I want it to just give me a blank new script so I can start writing, but at some point, it started launching with this annoying and confusing startup window where you have to click “new document”. A useless extra step that no one asked. It’s not that often that I need to open an existing script, and if I do that, I’d never navigate there via Finder paths because I often don’t even remember where the script files are, I have shortcuts to the folders and prefer to drag them to Script Editor instead. And we can all cmd+o, can’t we? I just hate software that gets “too smart” and thinks that it knows what the user wants, while in reality it’s just more distractions to dismiss.
If anyone else is annoyed by that startup window, I just want to share a way to disable it so you can have Script Editor launch with a new blank document instead.
Copy/type the following to Terminal (there are no line breaks, just spaces):
defaults write com.apple.ScriptEditor2 NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false
If you want to restore the old behaviour, just replace the final word false with true.
Bonus: If you’re annoyed by the same startup window that was introduced to TextEdit and would prefer it to start with a blank document as well, replace ScriptEditor2 with TextEdit.
Enjoy!
) a variant of the choose file dialog. An alternative to clicking the “New” button was to type Command-“n”. If past form’s anything to go by, I suspect that Apple will take away the ability not to get this dialog in some future OS release. 