Instructions For Mac Text Edit

It's easier than that. TextEdit->File->Page Setup->Paper Size->Custom Size (or Manage Custom Sizes) click on the + button, name it Untitled (or that may be the default), set the margins as you wish, and click OK. Select Untitled from Paper size dropdown, and cancel. Just drag any file into a TextEdit document. Bear in mind that any item you add to a TextEdit file makes the file larger, so if you want to send it by email, be careful not to put in too much.

Hey – looking for Vim?. Otherwise Hello and Welcome to what will probably be the weirdest thing I ever write. Sadly, I find it necessary to write up some instructions on how to reliably edit text on a Mac.

Windows users, bless ‘em, don’t have this problem. They can always use the Notepad.exe application, or the f. But Mac users don’t have those options for text editing.

And by editing text, I mean just text. No formatting, fonts, different sizes. No word processors. Because that’s what we feed into development tools and web browsers. Malwarebytes for mac managemnet.

Pure information. We use it to en code instructions to make computers do what we want. Development tools aren’t even capable of ignoring the formatting that comes out of a word processor. It just confuses them.

For many years I’ve been using Vim to do all my text editing. It’s my first choice after a full-featured IDE. And I’ll even install Vim keyboard bindings in the IDE (i.e. Make my IDE editor behave like Vim).

Imagine my horror when I discovered that the default text editor on Mac OS X 10.11, TextEdit, no longer supports plain text editing by default. It uses Rich Text Format instead (look at the name Apple – TextEdit!) How we make it use pure text is not at first obvious. This means that anyone who wants to write a simple script, HTML or CSS doesn’t have an GUI application that’ll do it out of the box on Mac OS X. So this is what I’ll cover as we talk about text an Mac OS X.

I’ll go over how we can make TextEdit use plain text, either for a single file or always. I’ll check out a solid third-party option that’s free, simple and just powerful enough. Finally I’ll take a look at my favorite, MacVim, and see if I can convince you to invest some time in learning it. And what do you get out of this?

You’ll know what options you have for editing plain text on a Mac (again, crazy you’d have to read up on this). You’ll also know all about the third-party options that are free and massively improve on TextEdit.

Text Editing on Mac – TextEdit So I think I’ve whined enough about TextEdit now. Nobody likes a sore loser, and I sure feel like I lost something.

Let’s take a look at an example, a tiny web page: Example with TextEdit   A tiny web page. If we open TextEdit, save the above (TextEdit will force you to use an.rtf extension), and then point a browser at it, what do you suppose we get? If we want our HTML to be treated as HTML, this is what we need to do. Start a new file. The old previous file can’t be saved as an HTML file. Put the above HTML in it. Go to the Format menu and select Make Plain Text: Save the file as example.html.

Open it in a browser, and hey-presto: But who wants to do that every time we edit a file? Not me, for one.

How to set up Text Edit to always be text-only So to avoid setting every file you edit in TextEdit to be text-only, here’s what we do. First, start up TextEdit. Then open TextEdit’s Preferences: Then, in the Format section at the top, choose Plain text, as shown below: Close the Preferences window, and you’re done! Text-only editing forever. The thing is, we can do way better than TextEdit for editing our code. TextEdit will do in an emergency, but we deserve better for serious coding. The Small, Simple, Text Editor for Mac.