TextEdit and the relief of simple software
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Format -> Make Plain Text
TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> Plain Text
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.
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.
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.
I bought PCalc anyway, it’s better than the standard app.
TextEdit is pretty great.
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...
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.
Anyway, I wonder if this would work for you.
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.
It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.
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.
Oh, for the good old days of AppleWorks!
No this is not a joke. Notepad has a giant always-present Copilot button now
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).
It's open source, fully Mac native, no Electron, fast, and small. I use it almost every hour of every day.
It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
Like any (most) actual native macOS applications.
defaults write -g NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool falseI hope they’ll do a TextKit 3 that will use modern design patterns…
I built https://blank.page/ to have a dead-simple page to write on the web. It’s like the more minimalist brother of TextEdit, but from a different mother (the browser, instead of MacOS), if that makes sense...
Man, if he only knew...
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?
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.
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.
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)
Plaintext only, no RTF.
Good programmers support for many languages.
No syntax highlighting, but I love it for taking notes and maintaining my .plan files. The simple TUI interface is oddly calming
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.
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.
Mostly I use apple notes, though.
I heard on newer windows versions it has copilot though which is crazy to me...
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.
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.
(I’m kidding, I’ve never intentionally used this macOS feature.)
Does it still exist? I haven’t seen it or heard of it in years.
A total nothing burger here.
LOL. I stopped reading there ... but I'll read the comments here with interest.
"ls" is code. You type it into the machine's keyboard, and it understands your code and performs that instruction. The statement is not "radically" wrong, it's an oversimplification that both communicates correctly to the lay reader, and to the proficient reader who understands the nuances and why they're irrelevant here.
Does Apple make any professional, polished, sophisticated apps? It’s their hardware and OS, but apps?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.