Assign a shortcut for creating and opening a dated text file on OS X

Question

I used to use tomboy wiki and they allowed you to bind opening a new note to a keyboard combination.

I use emacs on Lion and I want replicate this behaviour. I want to visit a new/existing file in my projects folder named yyyymmdd.md by pressing shift-z-command anywhere.

It might be possible to use automator to run a shell script that gets the iso date and then appends the directory path and .md at the end. Then it calls emacs with those arguments. As a service I can assign it to a keyboard combination. But I have no idea how to complete the steps exactly.

Answer 1

I don't know of any freeware that does this, but here are some shareware apps :

http://nulana.com/shortcuts

http://www.alfredapp.com/ - You need the paid powerpack

http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html - Not exactly what you want, but with an action/script you can make it work.

Answer 2

#!/bin/bash

date=$(date '+%Y%m%d')
f="$HOME/Desktop/$date.md"
[[ ! -f "$f" ]] && echo $'## $date\n' > "$f"
# emacs "$f"
open "$f" -a Aquamacs

And Assign a shortcut to running a script in OS X - Super User