For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.
Format -> Make Plain Text
Or if you want that as your default:
TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> Plain Text
I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.
Plus, plain text will likely outlive RTF. My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
I think I’d also point out that an operating system including or not including a specific piece of software is just not a big deal. The whole point of the operating system is to provide a framework to install other applications.
The iPad didn’t include a calculator for, what, over a decade? And it didn’t really matter.
Yes in practice people used either an ad based free calculator app, a web based calculator, their phone, etc. I maintain this isn’t a big deal. Annoying and I’m glad they fixed it, but not a big deal. Or, just pay like $1 or something for a proper app.
I bought PCalc anyway, it’s better than the standard app.
I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..
If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much untenable (and while RTF can use both UCS-2 and Windows codepages, Word seems to stick to—potentially multiple—codepages if it can, presumably for compatibility). That said, Microsoft always intended RTF to be Word’s exchange and archival format (unlike DOC, which was a mess they did not want to document), so it has enough of an official spec that extracting text, at least, is very possible.
> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.
“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”
This vaguely reminds me of Styledit, the included text editor from BeOS / Haiku.
It supports basic text formatting - alignment, different fonts/sizes/colours - but these are stored as extended attributes in the file, while the "actual file" remains plain text.
Plain text wouldn't be better in that case, but then I'd know it was corruption instead of questioning if there was a spec change and trying to find a compatible piece of software that would still open it.
RTF is a textual format. You can open it in a plain text editor to see whether it's completely trashed or not. If it isn't, then you can even recover the raw text from it without too much difficulty.
Forgot to add, you may want to buy a $50 SSD drive copy your old one over, and save all your files. It brings new life to old macs to get an SSD, alternatively if you're not going to power it on very often, just buy an old HDD. Old Macs are easy to maintenance the hardware. They are literal thanks, I'm not sure why that is, maybe its another sign of all the Windows bloat. Any time I install Linux on a Windows laptop, it feels like it adds 20 years of life to it. I still have a laptop I bought when Windows 8 came out, it still runs Linux just fine to this day.
It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.
Like how computers went straight for windowed GUIs even during the early era of limited resources before the fullscreen-only UI that the iPad brought.
After using SubEthaEdit, BB and what not for almost 9 years on mac now I finally thought one day that there might be N option in Text Edit to make it plaintext and there it was. Now I just use it. One of the most icky mac moments have been whenever a text file opened in textedit in its default behaviour and then I had to change “opens with” for that file.
I think I tried that. I'm not sure if I still have them, I'll have to go look, but I tried every app I could think of. I spent a few hours on it last time I looked. There was a paragraph here or there that would show up, with a bunch of garbage around it for the rest of the file.
> My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.
Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).
Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.
A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).
Apple added it as a system-wide service available in any text field. There isn't a dedicated button and branding for it within TextEdit. It's there because it's runs inside macOS.
I absolutely adore TextMate, but it hasn't kept up. It will often fail to respond to the `mate` terminal command, or it will take many seconds to start even on my mostly vanilla M4 Max.
Ackchyually, TextEdit now has built-in AI as any other native macOS textview control if Apple Intelligence is turned on. It even autocompletes your sentences.
It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
TextEdit has actually become super buggy since Apple switched to TextKit 2. There are now so many drawing and editing glitches, it's frustrating. I've switched over to using BBEdit for a lot of plain text editing that I used to do in TextEdit.
>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.
<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason>
I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting.
Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids?
Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized.
In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too?
A lot of this is new to the open source world. Proprietary systems have had this for decades. In a lot of ways, the stuff we use for things like javascript are a huge step downwards from the tooling available for Java, C#, and Visual Basic.
Visual Studio is an absolutely incredible piece of software. Two decades ago, you could drag and drop GUIs. You could write callback functions on buttons and never see the any of the code around that. You could write entire programs this way.
Vibe coding has existed since visual basic for applications escaped from the deep dark depths were it was wrought. If we want to go back further, look at fourth generation languages–the unholy realm where SQL came from. ;)
What we are seeing is wider adoption of old ideas. That wider adoption may be sufficient to cause a new era of engineering.
I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.
It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.
The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.
>Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline
Patches welcome! (Textedit is open source, should not be too hard to ask your favorite LLM to add a menu option to toggle the visibility of the format bar)
Happens for me too. I assume it's an iCloud thing (I vaguely remember the behaviour changing around the time I set up iCloud years ago), but I haven't ever bothered trying to figure out a way to turn it off...
Long before I got into programming I would pop into windows notepad whenever I wanted to type something for myself. The bare window is oddly comforting and helps me get into a flow state of writing, brainstorming, or whatever.
I heard on newer windows versions it has copilot though which is crazy to me...
All I need is notepad and paint, but I work on a Mac and daily drive a Gnome so I use TextEdit/gedit and GIMP. LibreOffice for presentations and spreadsheets, the few that I create.
I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use
This x100. While I do use AI in (Neo)vim it's not built in and you can take it or leave it. And even when you do choose to use it it's on an as-needed/wanted basis.
TE, like all (most?) of Apples apps manage documents for you. They auto save, auto version, etc. I love the paradigm. I love how painless it works for me. I love not having to decide anything when the app closes (say during a restart), or even during a crash. Just hit close, everything goes away, and comes back when you open again.
My TextEdit opens with 47 documents, cleverly named "Untitled" to "Untitled 47". Some of those are most certainly years old. TE is my computer scratch paper, and things just, well, linger.
These files "do not exist" on my computer, they're in Apples document enclave. That's OK. I know where they are.
The app that you’re supposed to use for persistent, unnamed, always open documents is obviously Stickies. Try it out by using cmd+shift+Y in any application to add selected text to a new sticky.
(I’m kidding, I’ve never intentionally used this macOS feature.)
I actually used this a lot back in snow leopard, but I think it’s gone now. It was actually really nice to have little persistent post-it notes floating around.
Does it still exist? I haven’t seen it or heard of it in years.
For those on Mac with Linux leaning, BBEdit in free mode will endlessly please you with all the great text stuff it can do and it's excellent UI. What a great program.
This feels like a bit of a nothing article jumping on the bandwagon of “ai bad sentiment = clicks”. Even though I agree with “ai bad” a lot, this feels like very lazy writing. It makes no attempt to understand why others might prefer or even rely upon features in their text editors. It’s just “this is simple and therefore I like it”. I mean, good for them! But doesn’t make for an interesting article at all. It’s basically like someone writing a whole article about saying “I like writing on paper”. Ok?
That’s a fair point, but I read the title and knew it was going to have that sentiment by the way it said relief of simple software. But even if we discount that part, the rest of my point still holds up.
Code editors are overkill, and can be annoying, for those who are just looking to write a bit of text and don't want the app to try and highlight it based on an assumed syntax, start indenting things, or whatever else it will try and do.
I used Sublime for many years, and currently use VS Code for work reasons. I still open TextEdit or Stickies all the time when I just need to note some text down and I don't want it in a random tab in my project. Sometimes I will use VS Code, if I need the tools if offers to do something to the text. It's all about picking the right tool for the job.
> how to disable highlighting than how to do line wrapping in the primitive app
In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up. I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.
> Nothing, they'll try to do nothing. Sublime Text doesn't even have a package manager embedded.
I just downloaded Sublime Text. After indenting, it preserves that indentation level when I hit return. This is something I want in a code editor, like Sublime Text. This is something I do not want it a basic text editor, like Text Edit. Both are working as expected.
It did default to Plain Text, and didn't switch on me when I did something like adding a colon at the end of the line, so that was good.
For those who don't need all the power Sublime Text has to offer and just want to write simple text, I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.
> In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up.
Ok, it came up in the 1- year here.
> I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.
How does this help? You can't have a non-wrapped line without an ugly hack from the link.
> preserves that indentation ... I do not want
So turn it off! It's configurable, as I said "Also, see the previous point ", unlike...
> Both are working as expected.
TextEdit is not working as expected, and I can't configure the behavior! I do need the tabulation to be preserved for various lists I create in plain text (ideally with a way to maintain the '-' or numeric prefix). I also need a convenient way to temporarily "hide" long lines without losing reading position (TextEdit moves the caret to the beginning of the window on changing the wrapping option) for a shorter "summary" view. A more visible non-flashing caret would also be nice (at least the flash is configurable via a hidden config)
These are primitive affordances for plain (not code) text editing. Of course, there are non-primitive ones like multiple cursors, proper search etc.
> I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.
So pick a different text editor without a nag! You're positioning fixable annoyances as total blockers while ignoring unfixable annoyances in the primitive system app.
Preview.app? I consider it to be the best app by Apple and haven't found anything that is on its level. But it does lack being able to do Acrobat (proprietary) signatures. Everything else in this space is a joke.
For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.
Or if you want that as your default: I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.Plus, plain text will likely outlive RTF. My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
> many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit
macOS also comes with vim btw.
Open terminal and then run vim from there.
Or use ed. macOS has ed also. And as we know, ed is the standard text editor.
https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html
And for a few years now (since ‘real’ emacs was removed, I think) ‘mg’, which is a terminal-based eMacs-alike.
Ya, they pretty much eradicated everything GPL to avoid any viral licensing problems.
Pico is also still included (and aliased to nano, funnily)
Until Catalina, emacs and nano were also included.
nano is now an alias for UW pico, since Apple won't take any new versions of GPL tools.
I think I’d also point out that an operating system including or not including a specific piece of software is just not a big deal. The whole point of the operating system is to provide a framework to install other applications.
The iPad didn’t include a calculator for, what, over a decade? And it didn’t really matter.
> The iPad didn’t include a calculator for, what, over a decade? And it didn’t really matter.
It made for a lot of ad-powered free calculator apps. I think that part wasn't particularly good for users.
Yes in practice people used either an ad based free calculator app, a web based calculator, their phone, etc. I maintain this isn’t a big deal. Annoying and I’m glad they fixed it, but not a big deal. Or, just pay like $1 or something for a proper app.
I bought PCalc anyway, it’s better than the standard app.
ed is old, but osx bash is ancient
I'm sort of surprised they didn't just build a bash compatible shell.
Well, they switched the default shell to zsh.
That's fair, I use macOS but I wasn't sure if I installed zsh or if it was what it came with, since I also use it on my Linux installs.
I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..
If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much untenable (and while RTF can use both UCS-2 and Windows codepages, Word seems to stick to—potentially multiple—codepages if it can, presumably for compatibility). That said, Microsoft always intended RTF to be Word’s exchange and archival format (unlike DOC, which was a mess they did not want to document), so it has enough of an official spec that extracting text, at least, is very possible.
RTF uses UTF-16, not UCS-2; you can in fact use two \u____ commands in a row using surrogate pairs.
Anyway, I wonder if this would work for you.
https://github.com/torstenvl/rtfproc
I do this so religiously that when I'm setting up a new system I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
TextEdit is pretty great.
> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.
Peep the NeXT 0.9 release notes: https://vtda.org/docs/computing/NeXT/NeXT%200.9-1.0%20Releas...
“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”
And the NeXTSTEP 3.0 programming book which goes on and on and on about the `Text` object and how good their RTF support is: https://simson.net/ref/1993/NeXTSTEP3.0.pdf#G16.44605
† https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
This vaguely reminds me of Styledit, the included text editor from BeOS / Haiku.
It supports basic text formatting - alignment, different fonts/sizes/colours - but these are stored as extended attributes in the file, while the "actual file" remains plain text.
Same
Assuming it was disk corruption, as seems likely, it's not immediately obvious to me why plain text would have been any better?
Plain text wouldn't be better in that case, but then I'd know it was corruption instead of questioning if there was a spec change and trying to find a compatible piece of software that would still open it.
RTF is a textual format. You can open it in a plain text editor to see whether it's completely trashed or not. If it isn't, then you can even recover the raw text from it without too much difficulty.
In that case, it was corrupt. I did try opening it in a plain text editor. Some of the file was there, but not the whole thing.
Probably Disk Corruption, my wife's 2008 Macbook has RTF files that still open, even on newer macs (after copying them), on Linux and Windows.
Forgot to add, you may want to buy a $50 SSD drive copy your old one over, and save all your files. It brings new life to old macs to get an SSD, alternatively if you're not going to power it on very often, just buy an old HDD. Old Macs are easy to maintenance the hardware. They are literal thanks, I'm not sure why that is, maybe its another sign of all the Windows bloat. Any time I install Linux on a Windows laptop, it feels like it adds 20 years of life to it. I still have a laptop I bought when Windows 8 came out, it still runs Linux just fine to this day.
It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.
Like how computers went straight for windowed GUIs even during the early era of limited resources before the fullscreen-only UI that the iPad brought.
Note that TextEdit will put curly quotes in your document if you let it
Curly quotes are plaintext, same as any other character.
Tbf it’s kinda on apple that this isn’t obvious, I’ve used Mac’s for 20 years and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But not a big deal of course.
After using SubEthaEdit, BB and what not for almost 9 years on mac now I finally thought one day that there might be N option in Text Edit to make it plaintext and there it was. Now I just use it. One of the most icky mac moments have been whenever a text file opened in textedit in its default behaviour and then I had to change “opens with” for that file.
Try opening them in Libreoffice, it's often able to open crusy old documents.
I think I tried that. I'm not sure if I still have them, I'll have to go look, but I tried every app I could think of. I spent a few hours on it last time I looked. There was a paragraph here or there that would show up, with a bunch of garbage around it for the rest of the file.
> My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.
Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).
Also, don't sleep on the tragically underappreciated Pages.
Fair, but Pages tries to hard to be a Word replacement. And I think it calls home to the Apple mothership quite often, too.
Oh, for the good old days of AppleWorks!
I figured something like this didn't need to be stated but then Microsoft added Copilot to Notepad
No this is not a joke. Notepad has a giant always-present Copilot button now
When I heard they rewrote Notepad in JavaScript I knew we had entered the End Times...
Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.
A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).
They put it in Paint, too. That's when I rediscovered Irfanview.
You think that's great, wait till you rediscover VLC!
If you're a Mac person, 100% try out iina if you haven't yet. Kinda like VLC, but way more Mac like.
Irfanview is amazing!
Apple has added it to textedit too with their equivalent intelligence enabled. You're throwing shade in the wrong direction.
Apple added it as a system-wide service available in any text field. There isn't a dedicated button and branding for it within TextEdit. It's there because it's runs inside macOS.
And it has a global off switch, too. Turn it off and it vanishes everywhere. Fully removing Copilot on the other hand is a constant battle.
I'd like to highly recommend CotEditor: https://coteditor.com
It's open source, fully Mac native, no Electron, fast, and small. I use it almost every hour of every day.
Coteditor is cool, but it's not TextMate though :(
I absolutely adore TextMate, but it hasn't kept up. It will often fail to respond to the `mate` terminal command, or it will take many seconds to start even on my mostly vanilla M4 Max.
Needs moar BBEdit. It's my daily driver on my M3 MBP at work and it and its `bbedit` shell helper (which I alias to `bb` for brevity) are never something I have to wait on: https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.html
This may be my most used software. It’s indispensable.
https://archive.ph/YvSxS
Ackchyually, TextEdit now has built-in AI as any other native macOS textview control if Apple Intelligence is turned on. It even autocompletes your sentences.
It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
> It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
Like any (most) actual native macOS applications.
You can fix this with:
You can also have apps default to a blank document instead of the open dialog:TextEdit has actually become super buggy since Apple switched to TextKit 2. There are now so many drawing and editing glitches, it's frustrating. I've switched over to using BBEdit for a lot of plain text editing that I used to do in TextEdit.
TextKit 2 is a disappointment tbh
I hope they’ll do a TextKit 3 that will use modern design patterns…
>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.
Man, if he only knew...
<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason>
I forgot the editor (maybe TextMate?) that was in vogue during the peak of the Ruby on Rails era, but there was such a feeling of magic to using what was a fairly basic editor that still had syntax highlighting.
Was this feeling of magic purely because I was younger? Or perhaps we did peak in terms of the ergonomics of human-controlling-machine without too many aids?
Fighter pilots used to fly with skill and instincts, but now are assisted by all sorts of high tech equipment that has removed much of the "flying skill" and replaced it with "equipment skill". It's not that fighter pilots are worse now. I'm sure they are better at achieving the outcomes desired, while commanding much more complex equipment. But the perhaps the art of flying is less emphasized.
In the same way, perhaps the era of software engineering is changing too?
(It 's TextMate. RIP)
This is a case of "everything old is new again".
A lot of this is new to the open source world. Proprietary systems have had this for decades. In a lot of ways, the stuff we use for things like javascript are a huge step downwards from the tooling available for Java, C#, and Visual Basic.
Visual Studio is an absolutely incredible piece of software. Two decades ago, you could drag and drop GUIs. You could write callback functions on buttons and never see the any of the code around that. You could write entire programs this way.
Vibe coding has existed since visual basic for applications escaped from the deep dark depths were it was wrought. If we want to go back further, look at fourth generation languages–the unholy realm where SQL came from. ;)
What we are seeing is wider adoption of old ideas. That wider adoption may be sufficient to cause a new era of engineering.
TextMate is also nice since it has left file browser which comes handy and preserves last open file/folders in the view.
Rmate is really nice to open remote files locally in Textmate.
My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.
I used to edit a news-stand magazine: every article that went into the magazine was subbed with TextEdit. All my daily notes are in TextEdit. My todo lists are in TextEdit. If I'm writing longform for the web I draft in TextEdit and then copy and paste.
It's just so immediate. Write, save. WYSIWYG formatting in the way the Mac has always done it.
The author says "It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does". I think it changed its interface once, c. 2005. Before then you could just have a window with no chrome whatsoever, just a blank slate to write in. Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline. That pissed me off for a while. But compared to the ongoing hurt of 25 years of a broken spatial Finder, I can cope with it.
Thank you, whoever in Apple maintains TextEdit.
>Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline
Patches welcome! (Textedit is open source, should not be too hard to ask your favorite LLM to add a menu option to toggle the visibility of the format bar)
Been using Microsoft Edit [0] for a good while on my Mac (the homebrew formula got merged recently [1])
No syntax highlighting, but I love it for taking notes and maintaining my .plan files. The simple TUI interface is oddly calming
[0] https://github.com/microsoft/edit
[1] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/pull/225837
TextEdit pet peeve: closing an empty window prompts the save dialog. Always.
An empty TexEdit window with a non-dirty buffer should just disappear upon close.
But I'm ready to learn otherwise from the HN commentariat.
Just tried: open TextEdit, new document (creates an empty document). Close it, no save dialog.
Yup, same. Save dialog only happens if I have added some text (but will still happen if I remove the text I added, which I expected anyways).
Happens for me too. I assume it's an iCloud thing (I vaguely remember the behaviour changing around the time I set up iCloud years ago), but I haven't ever bothered trying to figure out a way to turn it off...
Just two days ago my friend an I lost 5 minutes trying to disable line wrapping in TextEdit. We failed.
https://superuser.com/questions/80896/how-to-disable-line-wr...
Opinions there:
> I don't think textedit is designed to be much more than demoware.
I don't know. I use it to write my resume in rtf and then everything else I need in plain text.
Mostly I use apple notes, though.
Long before I got into programming I would pop into windows notepad whenever I wanted to type something for myself. The bare window is oddly comforting and helps me get into a flow state of writing, brainstorming, or whatever.
I heard on newer windows versions it has copilot though which is crazy to me...
TextEdit is actually open source. I'm surprised no one has made a TextEdit++.
Fwiw the last open source release was for 10.9, good for my purposes but probably older than what most would want.
All I need is notepad and paint, but I work on a Mac and daily drive a Gnome so I use TextEdit/gedit and GIMP. LibreOffice for presentations and spreadsheets, the few that I create.
Along the same lines, I reverted to mutt for email several months ago. Such a joy to use!
What about vim
Vim is far from simple no matter how you put it. It is tens of MB, plenty of features and a steep learning curve.
I think a better fit would be nano. Smaller and easier to use than vim.
Now, even nano is not that small, if you want small and you like vim, you have vi (not vim), like the version included in Busybox.
I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use
IDK vim and emacs are probably not for everyone, they are like the "higher math" of editing...
This x100. While I do use AI in (Neo)vim it's not built in and you can take it or leave it. And even when you do choose to use it it's on an as-needed/wanted basis.
I, um, "abuse" TextEdit.
TE, like all (most?) of Apples apps manage documents for you. They auto save, auto version, etc. I love the paradigm. I love how painless it works for me. I love not having to decide anything when the app closes (say during a restart), or even during a crash. Just hit close, everything goes away, and comes back when you open again.
My TextEdit opens with 47 documents, cleverly named "Untitled" to "Untitled 47". Some of those are most certainly years old. TE is my computer scratch paper, and things just, well, linger.
These files "do not exist" on my computer, they're in Apples document enclave. That's OK. I know where they are.
The app that you’re supposed to use for persistent, unnamed, always open documents is obviously Stickies. Try it out by using cmd+shift+Y in any application to add selected text to a new sticky.
(I’m kidding, I’ve never intentionally used this macOS feature.)
I actually used this a lot back in snow leopard, but I think it’s gone now. It was actually really nice to have little persistent post-it notes floating around.
Does it still exist? I haven’t seen it or heard of it in years.
For those on Mac with Linux leaning, BBEdit in free mode will endlessly please you with all the great text stuff it can do and it's excellent UI. What a great program.
Plaintext only, no RTF.
Good programmers support for many languages.
This feels like a bit of a nothing article jumping on the bandwagon of “ai bad sentiment = clicks”. Even though I agree with “ai bad” a lot, this feels like very lazy writing. It makes no attempt to understand why others might prefer or even rely upon features in their text editors. It’s just “this is simple and therefore I like it”. I mean, good for them! But doesn’t make for an interesting article at all. It’s basically like someone writing a whole article about saying “I like writing on paper”. Ok?
A total nothing burger here.
There’s nothing about AI in the title, so if they’re trying to get clicks based on that, they’re probably failing.
That’s a fair point, but I read the title and knew it was going to have that sentiment by the way it said relief of simple software. But even if we discount that part, the rest of my point still holds up.
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> The most basic computing interface is the command-line prompt, the empty box in which users write instructions in code directly to the machine
LOL. I stopped reading there ... but I'll read the comments here with interest.
this is a pretty reasonable fairly non-technical reduction for the average New Yorker reader.
Anything but TextEdit, for heaven’s sake. Sublime, BBEdit, Zed, and any other alternative is a thousand times more useful.
Does Apple make any professional, polished, sophisticated apps? It’s their hardware and OS, but apps?
Code editors are overkill, and can be annoying, for those who are just looking to write a bit of text and don't want the app to try and highlight it based on an assumed syntax, start indenting things, or whatever else it will try and do.
I used Sublime for many years, and currently use VS Code for work reasons. I still open TextEdit or Stickies all the time when I just need to note some text down and I don't want it in a random tab in my project. Sometimes I will use VS Code, if I need the tools if offers to do something to the text. It's all about picking the right tool for the job.
> want the app to try and highlight it based on an assumed syntax,
It will take you less time to figure out how to disable highlighting than how to do line wrapping in the primitive app
https://superuser.com/questions/80896/how-to-disable-line-wr...
> start indenting things, or whatever else it will try and do.
Nothing, they'll try to do nothing. Sublime Text doesn't even have a package manager embedded. Also, see the previous point
> how to disable highlighting than how to do line wrapping in the primitive app
In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up. I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.
> Nothing, they'll try to do nothing. Sublime Text doesn't even have a package manager embedded.
I just downloaded Sublime Text. After indenting, it preserves that indentation level when I hit return. This is something I want in a code editor, like Sublime Text. This is something I do not want it a basic text editor, like Text Edit. Both are working as expected.
It did default to Plain Text, and didn't switch on me when I did something like adding a colon at the end of the line, so that was good.
For those who don't need all the power Sublime Text has to offer and just want to write simple text, I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.
> In my 20+ years of casual TextEdit use, this has never come up.
Ok, it came up in the 1- year here.
> I turn windows wrapping on and off all the time, which is a simple option in the Format menu.
How does this help? You can't have a non-wrapped line without an ugly hack from the link.
> preserves that indentation ... I do not want
So turn it off! It's configurable, as I said "Also, see the previous point ", unlike...
> Both are working as expected.
TextEdit is not working as expected, and I can't configure the behavior! I do need the tabulation to be preserved for various lists I create in plain text (ideally with a way to maintain the '-' or numeric prefix). I also need a convenient way to temporarily "hide" long lines without losing reading position (TextEdit moves the caret to the beginning of the window on changing the wrapping option) for a shorter "summary" view. A more visible non-flashing caret would also be nice (at least the flash is configurable via a hidden config) These are primitive affordances for plain (not code) text editing. Of course, there are non-primitive ones like multiple cursors, proper search etc.
> I don't see the $99 price tag (or pop-ups to purchase) worth it.
So pick a different text editor without a nag! You're positioning fixable annoyances as total blockers while ignoring unfixable annoyances in the primitive system app.
Preview.app? I consider it to be the best app by Apple and haven't found anything that is on its level. But it does lack being able to do Acrobat (proprietary) signatures. Everything else in this space is a joke.
I used to like it, until I noticed that if you make annotations and save, the file size increases disproportionately.
At least that's how it was until 10.10, when I stopped using it for annotations.
Otherwise, as a plain reader, it's pretty nice and usable.
You just named three code editors. TextEdit is not a code editor. Not everyone is a developer.
The iWork apps are all brilliant.
YES!
Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.
Spent a bit of time thinking there must be one app by Apple but doesn’t seem like it.