To ignore TextEdit as being a ‘basic text editor’ would be a crime of immense proportions! It is one application I cannot live without; it’s that basic, simple nature of this app that makes it so powerful, user friendly, and ultimately, useful.
It’s always there for you! If you have something in your head you want to put down into words, it takes less than a second to be up and running. If you want to save something from the web, simply select the text and drop it into TextEdit’s icon to create a new document. There’s no document style to choose, neither is there a welcome splash screen. Once you begin to hit those keys, all that matter is the words that show up on your screen. No amount of sophisticated document controls in Pages, Word, OpenOffice, or the many other word processors can compete with the sheer speed at which you can produce words in TextEdit. Add to that you get access to the built in spelling and grammar checker, a the built in dictionary, as well as automatically insert smart ‘curly’ quotes where needed.
It’s powerful. Unlike it’s underpowered second-cousin-twice-removed on the Windows end, you can actually use TextEdit to generate a final document. Simply hitting Cmd+Shift+T converts your simple text editor into a rich text editor. You can then align text, use character styles, lists, and use the Font panel to change properties. The Format menu has a wide range of typographic features (granted they’re nothing like InDesign’s) including Kerning, Ligatures, as well as setting baselines. You can even insert the occasional graphic, although it’s graphic capabilities are very limited.
Basic character styling feature you would never use
One of the best features of TextEdit, is its autosave. You will hardly lose anything more than a few characters as it continuously saves your document, no matter what. That’s not the limit of TextEdit’s document handling power. It can open a wide range of documents, including actually render HTML. In fact, if you find yourself with a file you don’t know what to do with, TextEdit will probably open it. It can even open and save in any of the Microsoft Word formats. And last, but certainly not the least, it can export it as a PDF to seal the deal.
I sincerely hope you have realised this potential of TextEdit, and are making full use of it. Leave that old habit of launching MS Word every time you want to write something. Avoid Pages for when you don’t need your document to look absolutely amazing. And keep OpenOffice where it belongs, on Linux.
Thank you.
