TextEdit Love
What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.
I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking.
This resonated with me even though I mostly use TextEdit on secondary Macs that don’t have all my apps installed.
Via Michael Steeber:
I almost always have an unsaved document open on my Mac that I use like a scratchpad. And I have it set to create plain text files by default.
Some things may not require redesigning. We might have simply figured them out.
Other than that final font faux pas—TextEdit’s default font is Helvetica—it’s a wonderful ode to an underappreciated app and a beautiful bit of writing.
I get the feeling that Chayka would be better served switching from TextEdit to Apple Notes for most of these things he’s creating. Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.
[…]
But a big pile of unorganized RTF files on your desktop — or a big pile of unsaved document windows that remain open, in perpetuity, in TextEdit — is no way to live. You can use TextEdit like that, it supports being used like that, but it wasn’t designed to be used like that.
Of course, I think EagleFiler offers the best of both worlds. You get the same delightful text engine as TextEdit, yet you skip the friction of creating and saving files. But there’s no opaque database or proprietary file format like with Apple Notes; the real RTF files are still there, organized in real folders, and you can double-click to edit them in TextEdit itself if desired.
This exact scenario is what led me—22 years ago, in 2004!—to create xPad for macOS.
Since I write everything in Emacs, this never happens to me. Part of starting a new file is executing a
find-filewhich specifies its name and file system location. Even then, I just specify it in the minibuffer; there’s no annoying open dialog to deal with.[…]
As you all know, I solved the same problem with Journelly. I use it as my memo book and typically make about 10 entries per day. People think of Journelly as integrated with Emacs but it can also save its data in Markdown so it’s perfectly usable on any system and editor as long as you’re using an iPhone.
It’s amusing how 40 year old technology is still more convenient and easier to use than “modern” systems with dialog boxes for everything.
Notes are still evolving. The UI keeps changing. I’ve had a note shared by a friend hanging alongside my own notes for years, without me asking for it. I remember the moment when tags were introduced, and suddenly copy/paste from Slack started populating things in the sidebar. Then there was this scary asterisked dialog that slid so well into planned obsolescence worries that it felt like a self-own[…]
[…]
On top of that, the last version of Apple Notes on my macOS occasionally breaks copy/paste (!), which led to some writing loss on my part. (If you cut from one note intending to paste in another, and realize nothing was saved in the clipboard, you lost the text forever.)
“I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning”
Except TextKit 2 totally wrecked the TextEdit UI.
Dang what a downgrade (macOS Tahoe)
I finally figured out a longstanding, annoying TextEdit bug:
FB21856749 Mouse pointer changes from I-beam to arrow when clicked on insertion point, thereby preventing text selection
This is especially problematic when you open a document in TextEdit, which places the insertion point at the beginning, and you want to select text from the beginning. It’s difficult to avoid clicking on the insertion point.
Oh wow. I wonder if it’s because the insertion point is now its own view instead of being drawn by the text view (iirc).
See also: Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
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Of course you don't have to clutter your desktop with TextEdit notes...
Just never close them. TextEdit will reopen them every time you restart the app. It's kind of like Stickies in that way.
TextEdit is a such a great little piece of software. I do wish RTF supported structural styles; the computing world would be quite different if that'd been the case.
Coming to TextEdit from SimpleText was amazing.
I learned the Cocoa text system because of it. I enjoyed talking to guys who worked on it in the WWDC labs and learning from them. The design was so nice compared to the garbage text systems I was using. But TextKit largely stagnated, leaving fixes and basic features to be solved by devs (like Paul Kim's line numbers example).
TextKit 2 makes a mess with new performance pitfalls, metrics and layout bugs, janky scrollbars, WWDC features not working, and all the NSTextView bugs that never got fixed. Marcin Krzyzanowski documenting TextKit 2 bugs preserved my sanity by assuring me I'm not "holding it wrong".
TextEdit is the TextKit 2 posterchild and is worse because of it. The app would be nice again if Apple would just fix all TextKit 2 and NSTextView bugs, but after 4 years I'm doubting it's possible.
CotEditor and other text-heavy apps are holding on to TextKit 1. I fear Apple forcing us to use TextKit 2. TextKit 2 is basically the Liquid Ass update and I don't want to spend a summer fixing Apple's bugs, especially when TextEdit shows the inattention to detail and lack of care so readily.
I need to find a new text system with potential.
