I may be in the minority, but I never think to use TextEdit. I see it mentioned infrequently in this forum and hear it even less frequently on tech podcasts. Is it widely used, or has it been largely forgotten amid the wealth of available editors?
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Nice timing! Part of the most recent MPU with Chris Bailey is a love letter to TextEdit.
To me, TextEdit is the kind of simple app that you want to see touched as little as possible. Just a simple place for plain typing. Every OS should include one.
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I use BBEdit on Mac, Drafts on iPad.
I was not aware. That is good timing.
By default, files with a ātxtā extension open with TextEdit. But I donāt use it for anything not in plain text or any programming source files.
Itās nice and compact, but, maybe that doesnāt really matter these days with modern Macs being so fast.
Its basically the Mac Notepad on Windows. The Notes app has kind of superseded the functionality for most.
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I use it a lot to create RTF files. Itās no-frills elegance appeals to me for writing documents where I can see the WYSIWYG text, supports Styles, and Iāve using it so very long I donāt need to do anything but write.
As much as I like Bear, TextEdit does what I need without any distractions, just the window.
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Pretty sure I used Text Edit through college just for note taking in class. Might have even wrote a few short papers with it.
Thereās a terminal command I think it was somewhere to set text edit to bypass the open dialog box when the app launches and just launch a new blank document when the app opens.
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I use it many times a day and itās one of the apps (along with Thunderbird, Firefox, Obsidian, Calendar and Strongbox that I keep up and running from when I start my day until I go to bed.
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I use it more than I use Stickies, but not by much!
Maybe itās a āmeā problem, but it just doesnāt seem that useful to me. It has (I think) almost zero text manipulation tools, which is mostly why I use text editors. (It has case transformation.) It wonāt just open a blank document by default. A terminal incantation (per @dustying) is too arcane.
And if I want a nice writing environment, I use Ulysses (or I could use any of many others).
Itās just a little too vanilla for me.
I would think that for a lot of users, Notes would fulfil the same need.
Iām not saying that the apps are interchangeable, but between Notes (free with OS) and Pages (Free with device) theyāre more user friendly and more public.
This is so picky but I think I would actually use it a lot if I could make it more spacious.
I use good olā TextMate.
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I clearly remember years ago a colleague using TextEdit as a sort of to-do list, post-it notes tool, editing files in his desktop. I showed him that he had Stickies.app availableā¦ but he kept using TextEdit. Old systems stay in place.
I think the issue is not with TextEdit.app itself, itās because the RTF format has become more or less superseded.
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The issue for me with TextEdit is that there is not an iPad version. I can type up a simple document in TextEdit on my Mac, but how do I read/edit it on iPad? Sure, there may be third-party apps, but they are not going to have feature parity. In the end, I have found other apps to use and TextEdit doesnāt get used.
As an aside, it is my understanding that Scriviner uses TextEditās engine under the hood for its editing windows (with its own custom UI and settings). I donāt have a need for Scriviner, but when I tried its free trial, I absolutely loved its editor (with a few custom shortcuts, etc). If I could have Sivinerās editor as a stand-alone app (which saved RTF files) on both Mac and iPad, that would meet most of my needs.
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Contributing to the procession of TextEdit and its text editor mates that have been mentionedā¦BBEdit and TextMate, I advocate for MarkEdit. "Itās just like TextEdit on Mac but dedicated to Markdown.ā
Breaking with the āeditā and āmateā trend Iām taxiing off is Moped:
If you come from the Windows world, you may be missing a small utility: Notepad, a simple but essential tool for editing plain text files. While macOS counts on its own built-in text editor: TextEdit, it is actually more like a Rich Text Editor with full images, fonts and layout support. Similar to the built-in Windows Write or WordPad.
It kind of feels heavier than it should and in the way. There are known settings to make it look and feel lighter, but inside itās still the same. You can get the source and peek inside. Itās bigger and with older code than it needs to be.
Moped intends on feeling like Notepad, while being a full native of macOS, with a touch of modern syntax highlight and themes.
DEVONThink basically has TextEdit baked into it if you think about it. And if I insist on writing in RTF I reach for Bean: a macOS word processor.
When I really want a WYSIWIG text editing experience then Iāll use a formatted note in DEVONThink or Notebooks, which is just a fancy term for an HTML document but you get to write it like how you used to be able to in some web browsers and in Microsoft Front Pageā¦back in the day.
I can see how TextEdit may be an afterthought for Mac development and users.
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I use it constantly every day, but indirectly, as it opens whenever I double-click on a Devonthink text or rtf file to write or edit in a separate window instead of the internal Devonthink multi-pane layout.
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When I first got a Mac in 2005, the text editors it came with were AppleWorks and TextEdit. In Windows which I came from had NotePad and purchased copies of Office , needed for work, and WordPerfect, my preferred editor.
The natural choice was to use TextEdit since it was straightforward and AppleWorks was tagged for its demise with Pages just released. I did buy a copy of Office 2004 just in case.
At the recommendation of Francis-NoĆ«l Thomas and Mark Turner I once purchased a copy of Mastering WordPerfect 5.1 by Alan Simpson to help hone my prose. Iām yet to give it a purposeful look.
If I recall, Thomas and Turner referred to it not too far away from recommending the work of A.J. Liebling. And Euclid?
Every once in a while, I will break out BBEdit when I have a huge find and replace editing session, but usually I use CotEditor. TextEdit doesnāt have screen margins and the font size is too small although I could probably change it.