Is there a simple text edit shortcut...

There is no contextual menu I am aware of. You can try Safari>Services>Text Edit>New Window Containing Selection

 

Quicksilver will do this for you, you'll need the Text Manipulation Actions plug-in.

 

Document Palette roughly does what you want.

 

Here is a not so simple way to do it in automator… hopefully you have automator!!

Take a look here and do some reading.


If you want this to be a finder plug-in then you are going to have to do this as an Automator workflow.

Just past this text:

Code:

on run {input, parameters}
	try
		tell application "Finder" to set the this_folder ¬
			to (folder of the front window) as alias
	on error -- no open folder windows
		set the this_folder to path to desktop folder as alias
	end try
	
	set thefilename to text returned of (display dialog ¬
		"Create file named:" default answer "filename")
	if thefilename does not end with ".txt" then
		set thefullpath to POSIX path of this_folder & thefilename & ".txt"
	else
		set thefullpath to POSIX path of this_folder & thefilename
	end if
	do shell script "touch \"" & thefullpath & "\""
	return input
end run

into a Run Applescript action. Save it as a finder plug-in and then you can right-click, go to more, then to Automator and it will be in there. The only thing that i don't quite like about this is that it does not do any checking to see if the user typed in "filename.txt" or just "filename", if i get bored i will try to make it do some checking.

Hope that helps

EDIT: Ignore the thing about this not working like i want. I fixed it so that it checks what the user types in and sets the extension to .txt. If you want it to set it to something else feel free to edit the automator action as you see fit.