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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

On OSX I miss notepad. The dumbest possible text editor. No cloud syncing of notes, no attempt at being optimized for code, no intellisense behaviors, no spell checking or word processor functionality, no WSISWYGness. Just the dumbest possible text editing window to paste things, scratch a few notes, open raw text, etc. I haven’t found the equivalent in OSX even their basic tools are too smart by half.

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I use Sublime Text for this or vim, depending on where I am (in a terminal or not).

Vim is easy if you type vimtutor in the command line and follow the tutorial for the next 30 min. After that, it will always feel like a simple notepad, at least to me it did.

For actual coding I tend to use VS Code. I might give IntelliJ a try again if I can manage to get a free trial again.

You could use TextEdit I guess, but I agree that it's not a good experience; it just does slightly too much and not very well.

Ten years ago, this same frustration led me to release Fraise, a fork of Smultron, for quickly editing files.

I now use vim with a terminal to quickly edit a document, as I find most modern editors to be too slow to start (Visual Studio & co.).

I use vscode for this.

The best feature is that it keeps unsaved files even after quits. I have an instance of vscode with about 80 unsaved documents till now. Hopefully vscode won’t introduce a bug in an update that will wipe these.

I know, me too. The closest in Mac is TextEdit but then you have to do "Format -> Make Plain Text" when you open a new one.

Try using 'Stickies'??

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