[gawa]

I always had the same issue, even with the file explorer that I'm using currently (Thunar, XFCE's file browser). I never really looked for a solution, I kept changing the view (go from list view to to icons view) in order to find some empty space to right-click on.

Your comment and seeing that there are bug reports about it prompted me to think more than 5 seconds about this usability annoyance. I found a cool shortcut on Thunar: holding the control key + right click anywhere (including on a file) will bring up the right-click menu, from where I can create a new folder, paste, open in the terminal...

That's XFCE's Thunar solution to this problem. It was just not easily discoverable, but it's a good enough solution according to me, as I don't mind using the keyboard. Maybe it's the same on Gnome's File or Nautilus or other file explorers softwares, I don't know.

Edit: looking at it more closely, in Thunar the ctrl+right-click will show the "create new folder" option only if no file is selected. Otherwise it shows the contextual menu of the selection (hence the create new folder would not appear). So basically we have to unselect the files ... by clicking on an empty area (so back to square one) ... or we have to know about another keyboard shortcut (the "Escape" key) to clear the current selection before doing the ctrl+righ-click. Not ideal either.

[rav]

Can't you use ctrl-left click to deselect the selected file before using ctrl-right click to get the context menu?

[gawa]

Yes, sure. Although if multiple files or folders are selected, it's probably easier to just press the Escape key once instead of searching for each selected objects in the folder to unselect them one by one. What I was looking for was a reproducible way to make this right click menu appear. The sequence Escape+ctrl+righclick is a way to do that, it always work, wherever the cursor is, and no matter if the folder has many files or not. No need to look actively for a couple of empty pixels anymore or to think "What do I have to unselect before I can right-click to get a different contextual menu?".