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Hands-On Apple 230: TextEdit on macOS
00:30:57
Don't Forget This Light & Snappy Editor!
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- [00:01]
Micah Sargent
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
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Micah Sargent
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- [01:24]
Micah Sargent
Quick When's the last time you opened TextEdit? For a lot of Mac users, the answer is somewhere between I forgot it existed and well, only when I clicked it by accident. It doesn't get much love. There's no marketing around it, no hidden Apple intelligence features, no fancy collaboration tools. But, well, it's been quietly sitting in your applications folder for years. And it's actually one of the more useful little apps on the Mac, once you know what it's for and how to bend it to your will. Today we're giving TextEdit its moment to shine. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands on Apple. This episode is brought to you by Outsystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Outsystems platform and with good reason. Build, run and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use Outsystems to build, deploy and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With Outsystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your identic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Outsystems Build your agentic future. Learn more@outsystems.com TWIT that's OutSystems. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands on Apple. I am Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at one of my favorite apps on the Mac. It's an app I use every single day for, for well pasting, storing, editing, changing text on macOS. It's textedit. And not enough people give enough credit to what is a great little text editor. Let's start out by kind of understanding what TextEdit is. Well, first and foremost, it's Apple's built in text editor. In fact, it's been on the Mac since 2001 and actually evolved from an even older app called Edit that was part of NextStep. Of course, given that it is a basic text editor, it opens super fast because it's a tiny little lightweight app that doesn't have a lot of startup overhead. And I think that makes it much better as a text editor than some of the other sort of heavier apps that are out there. It also handles two fundamentally different kinds of documents. Rich text, that's text that has formatting applied to it. Fonts and colors and bold and italics, plus embedded images and then plain text, which of course is just characters with no formatting. And knowing the difference between these two modes is the whole thing you need to understand when it comes to text edit. The reason why I want to talk about text edit today is because I do think a lot of people dismiss it. And if they are using it, they dismiss it because it's stuck in the wrong mode for what they're trying to do. But when you know which mode it's in and what you want to do with it, then it becomes a lot more useful. And that's what we're going to look at today. Kind of how I use TextEdit and how I recommend setting it up on your Mac. So let's head over to macOS and take a look. All right, here we are on macOS and of course the first thing we're going to do is open TextEdit. Now you'll notice that it's down in my dock, but if you do not have it in your dock, holding down the command key, hitting that spacebar will bring up Spotlight Search where you can type in Text Edit or Start to, at which point the Text Edit app will appear. Hitting Enter brings it open and for most people, you're going to see the screen for creating a new TextEdit document. If I choose new document here, what pops up? Well, out of the box, TextEdit creates new documents in this rich text format. So you've got the formatting toolbar up at the top, you've got fonts, you've got alignment options and colors. It's a stripped down version of a word processor. Now when you save documents in this format, it will save it as an RTF document, which stands for rich text format. This means that the, the document will have that different formatting applied, bold, you know, italics, adding different changes to the, adding images or adding changes to the, the font that you're using, the alignment, whether it's got bullets, that kind of a thing. All of this is able to be change saved when it's in the rich text format. Now this I think is where people get a little hung up on TextEdit. They use it in this rich text format version and then you're going, well, why not just use pages or why not use Microsoft Word? And I'm with you, that's what I would use too. What you want to do is keep textedit in the plain text format. Now there are some ways, excuse me, that you can go about. This one is to go up to the format toolbar and choose make plain text. Now if you know me, you know I like a keyboard shortcut. There is one. Shift command T to make this plain text. So if I hold down shift, hold down command, hit the T. Now it's switched to plain text and this is fantastic. Formatting stripped away, toolbar disappears. It's just a pure text file. And when I save it, you'll notice that it's dot txt instead of rtf. That's what we want. Now when I said that I want to show you how to set things up, how I set it up. I will show you what you need to do because this watch out, if I hold on command and hit N when I open up a new document, there's rich text again. That's because you haven't changed the defaults. You need to go to Text edit. In the menu bar, choose settings. And here in format, we want to change it from rich text to plain text. Now I also like to choose wrap to page. So that way when I'm typing out the text, it will wrap the text to the next line. But outside of that, make it so that plain text is the default. Now if I hold down command and press N, you'll notice that a New screen appears. Now, you'll notice as well that because that wrap is on, it sets a sort of margin around the edges. If you don't like that, if you want your text window to be sort of adjustable, then deselect wrap to page. Now, if I hit command N, you'll notice that it just pops up in that size. So this is the way to make this text plain going forward. But the great thing is, if you ever do want to do some rich text formatting, you can do the same thing. Format make rich text or shift command T to make it rich text. So that's the way that I like to have it is plain text by default, and then changing it to rich text if we want to. Why does this matter? Well, plain text mode will turn text edit into a fast scratch pad that you can use for your code snippets, for your terminal commands, for your raw notes, for anything that you don't want formatting attached to. And so I actually have every single day a new TextEdit document that I open up. I save it as the date slug. So today would be 050526. And I save that to text edit. And in this text edit document, I put all of my notes for the day. Sometimes that means if I have a long message that I want to send to someone, I will type it out here first, do editing on it. Sometimes it means just grabbing some links from online. Sometimes it means holding on to code snippets. I have a few code snippets that are just saved in a TextEdit document that I can pull up, make adjustments to anytime I'm doing terminal commands that I need to change paths or make adjustments to what command I'm trying to send. All of that stuff automatically gets adjusted right there within TextEdit as a plain text document. And what's great about that is that then that plain text can be put anywhere it needs to, and it will appear there and in plain text as well. So another place that I like to use this is as a means of stripping rich formatting from text. What does that mean? Well, typically if you go online and you go to a webpage and you're trying to get some of the text from there, you'll hold down command, you press C. If you were to take that text and put it into something like Pages or Microsoft Word, by default it's going to paste with a lot of that formatting already applied. So you sometimes get this ugly background on the text. Sometimes you get huge text, all sorts of stuff. And of course you can go up to Edit, you can go to paste, you can go to Paste special, and then you can find the right paste. But does it paste with formatting? Does it paste with some of the stuff intact? It can be very confusing. So I have always used my daily Text Edit document as a means of turning rich text to plain text. Now, I don't want emails about this because I know that you can use all sorts of tools, all sorts of snippet managers and keyboard managers and clipboard managers to make changes to text to make it plain text. Fully aware of that as a possibility. But TextEdit was the first place that I started doing that. So it's muscle memory for me. And it may be muscle memory for you too, particularly if you keep this open. It's like having a little notepad that you would normally have on your desk to write down notes, but up there on your Mac and available to be changed, updated, saved. And I love being able to then go back to a given date, see what I was working on that day, what thoughts were coming into my head that day, what messages I sent to other people that day, what terminal commands I entered that day, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Very handy to do. Plus, plain text files are pretty much universal. They open everywhere, they sync cleanly. There's also version control with TextEdit, and that's great. And it's not a specific app format, so you don't have a. Docx file or a. XSLX file or what have you. It is Simply just a.txt file and it opens up very easily in anything. So I really recommend switching the default to plain text and using rich text as an option. With that menu bar, click the day to day of just jotting something down Text file is the way to go. Now let's give a look at the text edit settings. So remember that we clicked on text edit in the menu, we went to settings, and now here we are. So for format, I like to have it as plain text window size. This will change it so that if you do set wrap to page, it will determine the width of the window for a new window, 96 characters, the height of a window, that's 30. So let's change this to 50, just so you can see. And then we'll Change it to 150 and so that. Oops, of course I forgot to choose wrap to page. So that will change it to the to the specific height that you want there. Now, when it comes to setting this, if at any time you're unhappy with what you've done restore all defaults down at the bottom is how you can get back to how it's set up. Now I'm changing it back to plain text. You can change the plain. This is great too. The font choice between plain text or rich text is different, which gives you the ability to quickly say to differentiate visually between the two. So you know that when you're in plain text font that you're looking for Menlo, which is a fixed width font, versus Helvetica, which of course is not a fixed width font and appears in the rich text format. There are also properties that you can set up so that these rich text files have some additional information that is visible in different word processors. So I could put my name here, I could put a copyright, I could put an organization. If I have one of those. All of that can be here so that by default these documents are tagged with this metadata and then the options. So this is a very important one. Check spelling as you type is one that I leave on because what it is doing is just letting you know if you have a typo in your text, it won't automatically change it. And that's important because changing it is where it can get annoying. So I have this turned on, but it's just checking the spelling. Then check grammar. With spelling will also check your grammar in the same way that it would in a word processor. This is the one that I have turned off correct spelling automatically. If you have this turned on when you type something and you type it According to what Amos thinks is wrong, then it will change the spelling to what Amos thinks is correct. Same thing as Autocorrect on an iPhone. I don't want that. I don't want it changing the way that I'm typing. If I have a typo, I'll fix it myself. So I have that turned off. It can be annoying at times when you have something that you know is accurate but it's not in the dictionary and so macOS changes it. So I just turn that off. Show ruler. This is the ability to see the ruler in a rich text document so that you can set up margins and things like that. That's up to you. I have it turned on so that if I am working in a rich text format, which I rarely am able to set up those different tools, data detectors which will show information like dates and addresses and know that they are dates and addresses and therefore give you the ability to interact with them for things like being able to add a date to your calendar or being able to look up an address in your Maps application of choice. Smart quotes and dashes. This says to do it in rich text documents only. That means that when you are adding the quote sign or the dash, then what it does is it will change those quotes and dashes from the standard versions to the actual typographic symbols for quotes. So if you weren't aware, by default your keyboard is going to type what is equivalent in the U.S. to the foot sign, the sign for, you know, one standard foot, 12 inches or the inch sign, which is two quote marks. But they're not quote marks, they're just lines down versus the actual typographic quotes which are curly and therefore appear in this program using Menlo as sort of diagonal. So what happens is in rich text documents, it will change those quote signs to what they were intended to be. So I type this here, comma, he said, and if I put the quotes here, then it shouldn't change. But if I were to go to a rich text document, then I would be able to have that automatically update. I can also set it so that it doesn't actually check and correct spelling in a plain text document. So you can keep those things set, but. But make it so that it's only happening when you're working with a rich text document. There's also smart copy and paste, which is going to. When it is pasting text into a rich text document, try to figure out your intention on whether you wanted to copy and paste all of the formatting or some of it and whether wanted to match the formatting of the document or keep the original formatting. Smart quotes, which again will change those quotes from the inch and foot marks to the actual typographic quotes. Smart dashes, which again will change those dashes. Smart links, which will turn those links into clickable links. And then last but not least, text replacement, which is tied to the text replacement options in your keyboard settings. So by default I have on check spelling as you type, Check grammar with spelling, show ruler, Smart quotes and dashes enriched. Actually I want that turned off. Data detectors, I want turned on and then smart copy paste, smart quotes, smart dashes, all turned on. Smart links I'll have turned on and text replacement I will have turned on. So the thing that gets turned off is correct spelling automatically. I only want it to change if I change it. And then those two options that are specific to rich text documents because I do indeed want it to change quotes and dashes in my plain text documents. Now we'll go to open and save and these are some Other settings that are important when opening a file display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text. So yes, what that does is when I open an HTML file and it doesn't attempt to show it as if I were to have, you know, open bracket p, close bracket some text and then open bracket slash p close bracket, that's not going to display as a formatted paragraph, but instead will display with that full set of text and then display RTF files as RTF code instead of formatted text. That will change it so that if you were to open a dot RTF file, it will display the plain text RTF version of that text as opposed to actual formatted text where you have bold and H1s and H2s, et cetera. Then and I have the HTML one turned on, I'm going to leave the RTF one alone because if I open an RTF file, I do want to edit it as a rich text file with all of the formatting in place. When saving a file, add.txt extension to plain text files. I tend to have this turned on because otherwise it may not save an extension on your file. And then when macOS attempts to open it, it goes I don't know what this is and I don't know how to open it. So adding that. Txt extension makes sure that it's there. Plain text file encoding I always have these set to automatic HTML. I leave these at the default. So what it does is it keeps for the plain text file, it smartly encodes them. I again leave it at automatic. Most of the time it's going to do it as Unicode and then an HTML saving. The document type is set to HTML 4.01. Strict styling is set to embedded CSS and encoding is set to Unicode with the preserve white space option. Again, those are the defaults. I don't have any reason to change them. If you are doing HTML editing in TextEdit then you may want to change those. But outside of that it's good to just leave them alone.
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Micah Sargent
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- [22:47]
Micah Sargent
the time what I'm doing is stripping formatting from copied text. I paste it into here, then I paste it into or then I select it and paste it into the place I'm trying to Again a great scratch pad. When I am doing terminal commands and I need to make a change or adjust a path very quickly, I will pop it into TextEdit first. Love it as a quick notes scratch pad feature and of course that ability to go through and quickly make adjustments to not just text files but also MD files, log files, conf files and you can even open up JSON files and of course XML files here. CSV files as well. Just understand that the bigger they are, the more complicated they might be to edit in TextEdit because they are just absolutely plain text, no formatting added. Now when it comes to TextEdit, something that's really nice is the ability to browse previous versions of the document. That is because TextEdit has the same versioning system that you get with Apple's other first party version text and media editing tools. So if you'd like you can go into File and you can choose Revert to and then choose Browse all versions. This will show you all the versions of this TextEdit document and give you the ability to change it to one of those. So perhaps you deleted some text and you want to get it back. And Command Z isn't working because it's been a while since you've been in the document and you've done other things. That's a great way to get those versions back. You can also use it with Find and Replace holding down the command key. Pressing F will let you find something. And this is another thing that I'll do if I've got a long document and let's say the thing Ms. Micah is the name of a host of a show on the Twit network. Micah is Micah is a Midwesterner living in Portland, Oregon. Micah is a dog owner. Micah has two dogs. Micah is gluten intolerant and this is a whole paragraph and oh my goodness they misspelled my name. Well I can type in M I, C, a H, hit the Replace checkbox and replace all instances of M I cah with Mikah by choosing Replace, which will do it one at a time, or all, which will replace all occurrences of the found text. And you can also click and hold to do Replace all in selection. So if you have text highlighted, select all, which will select all of the text and then select all in Selection, which will of course select all the instances of Micah and then let you act on them. In this case, I want to choose Replace All. Now, they all say mica. But here's a cool thing. If you notice next to the search icon in the Find and Replace dialog here, there's a little disclosure triangle. Hitting that lets you do some special searches. You can ignore case or not ignore case. So let's say that you have a word that, when it's uppercase, is supposed to be spelled one way because it's a brand, but when it's lowercase, it's spelled the correct way because it's an actual word. Then you can choose not to ignore the case so that it only makes changes to the one that's lowercase or uppercase, depending on what you've written here. Wrap around will will go and start over essentially for that. And then you can change whether it can. Your search is that it contains the specific search term that you've put in that it starts with the specific search term that you've put in that it is a full word that is important when you are trying to keep it from finding. Because if you had, let's say if you had stamp the word standard multiple times throughout and you were searching for the word tan throughout your document standard has the word tan in it. And so it will find that by default in the word standard. However, if you choose full word, then what it does is it makes sure that it only finds instances of tan on its own, not part of another word. And then even better, for those of you who are a little bit nerdy, you'll note that there is an insert pattern option. This is for regex. Yes, you can do regular expressions to search for terms. We're not going to do any sort of training on regular expressions. If you know, you know, if you don't look up regular expressions and you can learn more. But it does a lot of great things when it comes to being able to searching for specific things within a body of text in this case. So we've fixed Micah's spelling throughout. Fantastic. As I mentioned though, the ability to go through and change the versions. And then the last thing that I want to mention is that you can in the edit tool go down to the to the option speech and choose Start speaking. What does that do? Well, it will speak whatever text is within your text edit document. Now why in the world would you want your computer reading text out loud to you? Well, there's one reason, because it's funny and you can type in things and have your computer say them out loud. Fun, funny, cute little trick, right? But more importantly, this is a really good thing when it comes to proofreading. Our brains are really good at autocorrect and there are lots of tricks that copy editors will use to make sure that they are not missing different errors that are being made in text. Because our eyes and our brain sort of work together to pattern match, figure out what somebody's trying to say and therefore we miss it at times, miss what was actually a typo. So by using proofreading, your eyes are not focused on the text and you're just listening. And that can be a good way to catch something that you wouldn't otherwise be able to see. Now let's talk about when we should use TextEdit for all those reasons I just mentioned. But what about when we shouldn't use TextEdit? Well, for anything that's sort of serious when it comes to code. So, you know, full on editing of a web page or writing code for an app. TextEdit doesn't do syntax highlighting, it doesn't do code autocomplete, it doesn't do any of the things that make coding a lot easier and a lot more pleasant. So something like VS Code, bbedit and a bunch of other options, even Xcode are so much better as an option for being able to do code editing on your Mac. TextEdit, simple for simple terminal commands, but more than that, real word processing. If you're writing a resume, a long form document that's got a lot of images, that's got, you know, drop caps and pull quotes and everything else, Pages or Word are going to be the better places to go for that. For notes that you want to be able to search sort of all throughout and to be able to sort of cross reference. That's where the Notes app or Obsidian or some other system, if you have that notion, would be a better place for you to do that. TextEdit is not trying to be this huge notes locale, it is a text editor. And then if you need a live preview of markdown, if you are a markdown writer like I am, then something like IA Writer again, Obsidian, Ulysses, Bear are all places to go for markdown with live preview of how that document will look. So the pitch for TextEdit, honestly, it's not that it's going to replace any of these more powerful tools. It's not supposed to be that it's fast, it's free, it's lightweight, and it just fills this sort of in between gap where you need some text manipulation, but you don't want to wait for that heavier app to spin up and then for all that stuff to dig through. So I don't think the TextEdit's going to change your life by any means. But it is, I feel, a useful little app that deserves a spot on your doc if you haven't given it a try. So consider getting it onto your dock, switching the default to plain text, learning the keyboard shortcut to toggle into rich text formatting if you need to, and set it up for those small daily tasks where normally you'd launch Word or Pages and you're like, why am I having to wait for this? Or maybe even launching the Notes app. And maybe you don't want to, you know, cloud or clutter your Notes app with stuff. This is a great place to strip formatting, to jot quick notes, to draft something before you send it. It's perfect for that. Think of it as that little notepad that you'd have on your desk, but the digital version. Try it for a week and you may find yourself reaching for it more often than you'd expect. Folks, thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of Hands on Apple. It is my great pleasure to bring you the show every week. If you have questions for me, if you have topics you'd like me to cover, anything like that, you can email me Hoat TV and I'll be back next week with more. Until then though, bye bye.