It's open source, fully Mac native, no Electron, fast, and small. I use it almost every hour of every day.
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.
Man, if he only knew...
I hope they’ll do a TextKit 3 that will use modern design patterns…
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.
Does Apple make any professional, polished, sophisticated apps? It’s their hardware and OS, but apps?
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
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 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 falseWhile 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!
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)
I heard on newer windows versions it has copilot though which is crazy to me...
LOL. I stopped reading there ... but I'll read the comments here with interest.
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.
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.)
Plaintext only, no RTF.
Good programmers support for many languages.
al_borland•7h ago
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.
QuantumNomad_•7h ago
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
ksherlock•7h ago
jshier•6h ago
mfro•7h ago
schmidtleonard•7h ago
giancarlostoro•4h ago
Wowfunhappy•4h ago
jrmg•3h ago
zie•1h ago
Wowfunhappy•7h ago
al_borland•7h ago
wat10000•7h ago
al_borland•7h ago
ravetcofx•7h ago
al_borland•7h ago
xyzzy_plugh•7h ago
TextEdit is pretty great.
Lammy•6h ago
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...
daveidol•44m ago
jesse__•7h ago
mananaysiempre•4h ago
giancarlostoro•4h ago
Razengan•4h ago
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.
crossroadsguy•2h ago
thaumasiotes•17m ago
It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.