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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

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.

Pico is also still included (and aliased to nano, funnily)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Early releases of the dev tools even included the TextEdit source for you to learn from.

Same

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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