Why can’t I figure out what to do with this? I have a working snippet, but that puts an (un-clickable) ‘a’ tag in a text document - so what am I missing?

I suspect I’d use this a lot. I wrote a bash script a while ago that does basically the same thing, but I spent more time in TextMate than in the terminal.

merlin:

Ready for some Textmate hotness? Okay, then.

  <a href="txmt://open?url=file:///Users/USERNAME/path/to/ \   
  scratch-`date +%Y-%m-%d`_`date +%H-%M-%S`.txt" \   
  src="scratch-`date +%Y-%m-%d`_`date +%H-%M-%S`'"> \  
  New at `date +%Y-%m-%d`_`date +%H-%M-%S`</a>

Custom Bundle Snippet that creates a goofy-looking but clickable txmt:// link to “/path/to/2011-03-22_07-52-44.txt”.

Click that link anywhere on your Mac, and you open a new text file—already saved—with that name.

For the five nerds that can actually use this? You’re welcome.