TextEdit has its roots in OPENSTEP, where it was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. It even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.
coldtea 10 hours ago [-]
>a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things
Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.
It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.
steve1977 10 hours ago [-]
It's like comparing Apple Photos to Lightoom maybe.
coldtea 9 hours ago [-]
Yes. Which, for people needing some light editing and archiving, it's a useful comparison.
anthk 9 hours ago [-]
Wordpad to Word. Ted (GTK2 build, it's an RTF editor) to Libreoffice Writer.
Yes, but the engine is running in a separate process, and communicates over a generic engine protocol, so that is no reason that would force open sourcing the GUI.
haunter 10 hours ago [-]
Wonder if it can be still compiled for modern Apple Silicon MacOS given Cocoa have been pretty much removed
wpm 9 hours ago [-]
I had to change some .strings file encoding settings and set the build target to macOS 14, but other than that and a few deprecation warnings, it built just fine in Xcode 27.2 on Tahoe 26.7.2.
Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
haunter 8 hours ago [-]
> Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
Ahh my bad sorry
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
Cocoa hasn't been removed.
mananaysiempre 13 hours ago [-]
> TextEdit [...] was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
Even before OPENSTEP. And you can still build TextEdit on Linux or BSD. So, it is the cross-platform option.
I ran it for years on Linux.
2b3a51 8 hours ago [-]
Would building TextEdit on Linux require the GnuStep libraries or similar? Or is it stand-alone. Web search isn't coming up with much and I'm interested.
anthk 6 hours ago [-]
GNUStep of course, back in the day it was part of a GNUStep application bundle.
ch_sm 14 hours ago [-]
Pages is an underrated Word Processor. It has the lessons of 30 years of development and experimentation of WYSIWYG editors distilled and applied in a tight little package.
Cockbrand 13 hours ago [-]
The same goes for Preview.app - it's a very underrated, super powerful app for PDF editing and lots of other stuff.
apparent 53 minutes ago [-]
Love using it to make white bits transparent. The tool also exists in Keynote but is more powerful in Preview. It's the second tool from the left in the editing toolbar.
alsetmusic 6 hours ago [-]
All the original apps / utilities in old OSX were surprisingly powerful given their simple interfaces. Network Utility, Image Capture, etc just did the things. I remember pointing out to my father (on his first Mac) that we were eschewing HP's drivers and using what Apple built right into the OS. I don't think it had the impact on him that it had on me.
tonyedgecombe 12 hours ago [-]
It does have a lot of polish. I'm just a bit sore that it no longer supports PostScript.
karel-3d 12 hours ago [-]
It arguably gets worse with every OS X iteration. I understand why they removed postscript support, but it still makes me sad.
But it can still do a lot.
whywhywhywhy 5 hours ago [-]
It's been screwed up since Lion I think, if that was the one where they played with the idea of "people don't have to save anymore", still decent but has some dumb bits of friction in the main flows from the mistakes of that idea.
The iOS version is straight up trash though if you're trying to work with multiple PDFs like bank statements on iOS.
frou_dh 11 hours ago [-]
My pet peeve is that every single time you click any web link in PDFs, you have to confirm via a dialog that you want to visit a link. You used to just be able to click links.
whartung 10 hours ago [-]
I’ve never seen that, I use Safari. My nit about PDFs is pages that download the PDF rather than view them within the browser.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago [-]
For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.
smallstepforman 12 hours ago [-]
The team that created Pages, before that they were GoBe Productive for BeOS, and before that Clarris, so Pages is their 3rd or 4th redesign from scratch.
malshe 9 hours ago [-]
My main issue with Pages is that it doesn't allow plugins like Word does. I'm a heavy Zotero user so a lack of Zotero plugin means I can't use Pages for anything meaningful.
Someone 7 hours ago [-]
There is an Endnote plugin. Google tells me it is developed by Apple, so the plug-in interface isn’t published, and it also may be limited to that single use case, but that’s a (probably tiny) lead towards writing one.
malshe 3 hours ago [-]
I am aware of Endnote plugin but my entire library is on Zotero. I have close to 20K papers there as of today and it's constantly expanding, so I can't move to Endnote. Besides that I am a lifelong supporter of Zotero.
gampleman 15 hours ago [-]
Also Pages also has a fairly decent print design mode. Sure, it can't compete with something like Indesign in feature parity, but I find it pretty useful to do posters, booklets, flyers and the like. It's free and fairly intuitive to use.
phil-pickering 13 hours ago [-]
You should be able to create and use templates for TextEdit using the Stationery Pad feature which comes built-in to macOS:
Stationery Pads are one of the almost criminally underused and well-hidden features that have been around since the Mac OS (pre-OSX) days.
Another one is Cmd+H for hiding an app. People often minimize the current window to see the next app underneath, while hiding the current app is much more elegant and creates a lot less friction for restoring it later.
Which of these hidden champions did I forget?
staplung 8 hours ago [-]
.inetloc files. Mostly commonly used for HTML links but they can also be used to create SSH logins. They're easy to create too: just type something like
ssh://soandso@whatshername.com
into virtually any app (I use TextEdit), select the text and drag it out to some Finder location. It will create the file automatically. Then just click on the file (or open it with Quicksilver, Alfred, et. al) and it will open a new Terminal window with you ssh'd to the host as that user (normal auth procedures apply).
I don't use them too much anymore because there doesn't seem to be any way to get iTerm2 to be the default app to open such files (on modern MacOS versions the application drop-down in the Finder info window is greyed out) and I don't SSH into as many machines as I once did.
EDIT: turns out you can get iTerm2 to be the default opener for ssh .inetloc files; it's just done inside iTerm itself.
Nice! I also remember Text Clippings, although I haven't used those in ages.
jpease 10 hours ago [-]
I’d never seen that. Thank you for sharing!
jeena 4 hours ago [-]
Back when Apple put in cloud in TextEdit I had to stop using it because it was too many steps to start writing, you had to choose a file path and name before you could start typing. I've always used it to quickly jot down something, never because it had rich text or so. So I had to write my own simple and fast alternative: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/TextEd.app (that was 13 years ago, meanwhile I gave up on Apple).
Yesterday I got a email from someone telling me they ported TextEd from Objective-C to Swift so they brought it back to life https://github.com/jrcii/texted
dcrazy 4 hours ago [-]
Command-N in TextEdit creates a new file called Untitled in your iCloud Drive’s TextEdit folder. No upfront name choice required.
lotsofpizza 4 hours ago [-]
I had the same problem! Disabling iCloud for TextEdit solved that issue.
josephwegner 12 hours ago [-]
I’ve been a TextEdit-only user for years. I write notes as quick streams of consciousness for me to pick up later. TextEdit is great, but I have similar qualms as the author, and I also have been wanting something that allowed me to build some programmatic tooling around the short notes I write (ie: format these and move them to my Todo list). I’ve been working on a very simple app that is rock solid like TextEdit, but with some niceties for using it as a notes app, instead of a rich text editor.
I like the look of Jort. It almost makes me wish I still used a Mac.
hbn 8 hours ago [-]
Apple's office suite is quite nice but I fear they're devaluing it with all their Creator Studio upsells embedded in the UI over the past few years. It seems like a lot of Apple is headed in that direction and it worries me.
justauserid 6 hours ago [-]
After more than a decade of successfully avoiding TextEdit (and seeing it only once in every months by mistake when some rtf file click would open it) I finally changed the format to Plain Text, a few months ago, and it is now consistently beating CotEditor in usage. I honestly never even thought I could use this app in plain text mode. SubEthaEdit would have been still my favourite but it's abandoned now.
tptacek 7 hours ago [-]
Real heads know that Notes.app is the sleeper Apple text editing app.
js2 5 hours ago [-]
I just really wish it had even the most basic revision control. It's really easy to accidentally wipe out an entire note on your iPhone and then iCloud helpfully syncs it everywhere. Or even the ability to simply make a note read-only would be nice.
gsoid 48 minutes ago [-]
1) icloud recovery 2) you can lock notes (at least in ios 26)
MysteryTramp 8 hours ago [-]
I wish Apple would make TextEdit for iPad. I really want an rtf editor for iPad that doesn’t suck. I know I’m supposed to use markdown, but I like to write in rtf.
alsetmusic 6 hours ago [-]
Dr. Drang's blog has been in my RSS feeds for around 8-10 years. While the author postulates about math or physics that I can't understand, I love the software parts (some of which I can't understand literally, but understand theoretically).
I was a hardcore user of TextEdit (text only mode) until SublimeText and vim replaced it. I never would have thought to need to hide the toolbar because I always loaded it as a plaintext editor and I had to go look for a way to hide it in RTF mode to verify that Drang was right about not being able to hide it. Confirmed, can't find a way to hide it. Didn't bother me before I was a plaintext person.
jan_m_savage 11 hours ago [-]
" A note for someone who’s coming over to water my plants while I’m out of town shouldn’t look like an analysis of a mobile crane tipover accident. "
Love this. Humor.
wpm 23 minutes ago [-]
>Now it’s true that Pages has a toolbar, but it’s tucked up in the title bar where it doesn’t take away space from the document.
Ok, number one the TextEdit bar is like 5 pixels taller so maybe being a little melodramatic here.
But straight up, it's flat out wrong to say "the Pages tool bar doesn't take space away from the document" because if those buttons weren't smashed into the title bar, the title bar would only need to be as tall as the title bar in Text Edit. It's still stealing precious vertical pixels from you, possibly even 5!
devilsdata 5 hours ago [-]
I use TextEdit a lot for drafting fiction. I only use it in plaintext mode, and enable word wrap with ⌘ + W.
To me there is noticeable input lag when using Obsidian or IA Writer that just doesn't exist in TextEdit.app. I also could use Nvim, which I use for coding, but often don't care enough about editing while I'm drafting.
Doctor_Fegg 5 hours ago [-]
> I really thought TextEdit would have a setting for hiding the toolbar, but I haven’t found one.
It used to. It became always-on in one of the big cat releases, I forget which one. I too wish it had this option, but given that it's about the only thing I'd change in TextEdit, I can live with it.
cgdstnc 5 hours ago [-]
After changing default format to plain text, textedit was great for me until i lost some work due to unexpected froze and crash multiple times. Since then i use vscode for simple stuff but it's definitely not my favorite.
Synaesthesia 9 hours ago [-]
Pages is lovely, I like how intuitive it is to use (Numbers too)
Truly a lot more user friendly than Microsoft Office.
coldtea 10 hours ago [-]
>Honestly, who needs buttons for bold and italic? Or left, center, and right justification?
Almost every layman user? - at least for the latter, as there are well known shortcuts for the former many know.
>An advantage of TextEdit that Allison points out and which I concede: TextEdit uses much less memory than Pages. I wish that weren’t the case, but I have a 48 GB MacBook Pro, so I can afford to be profligate with RAM.
You can't be profligate with the TextEdit vs Pages level RAM use on a fucking 48GB laptop? I can be way more profligate (sic) even on 16GB or 8GB laptops.
Oh, and his other issue is you can't hide TextEdit's menubar and it takes space from the document. That for one of the more streamlined, and to the point, menubars in the history of GUI software...
I'm all for a good app review or even a good app putdown, but these guy's pet peeves, which he blows up into major issues when he's picking one or the other app are really bizarre.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah I generally like Dr. Drang’s writing but the formatting buttons seemed like a really odd complaint to me too.
It’s so useful to have ultra-common stuff right at hand. I use keyboard shortcuts for some but don’t know them for others. I agree it’s a godsend for inexperienced users.
One of my top complaints about the ribbon or the sidebar stuff in pages is how hard it is to find that stuff.
And sure MacWrite didn’t show it, but it was on a 512x342 pixel screen. Adding a toolbar would take away very very precious vertical space. We can afford it now, the trade-off is different.
The article is about his personal preference, so it may not fit him well. But as a general criticism it seems very odd.
Danox 9 hours ago [-]
The review can’t be that bad. I signed up for text edit and bought it.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
Bought it? It’s included in MacOS.
sharts 7 hours ago [-]
ClarisWorks from the 90s was the best
YVoyiatzis 5 hours ago [-]
So was WordPerfect, the grand-daddy of word processors. I, for one, prefer VCS for my daily text-related needs. Were it not for VSC I'd most likely resort to using iA Writer full-time.
12 hours ago [-]
Upvoter33 11 hours ago [-]
Vs emacs?
intrasight 7 hours ago [-]
Yup. Why change editors when you change OS?
pnb1 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
carlos-cute 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
esFran 14 hours ago [-]
Give me KDE Kate, or give me death!
delecti 11 hours ago [-]
Kate is a text editor, TextEdit and Pages are word processors. I'd also love Kate (or Notepad++) on macos, they're just kinda a non sequitur.
WillAdams 10 hours ago [-]
TextEdit is a text editor, which has had an optional WYSIWYG word processing mode added to it --- hit cmd shift t to go into text edit mode.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
Which is how I use it most of the time.
It’s like notepad + wordpad in one. Great little app.
wpm 9 hours ago [-]
Kate runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS already
Rendered at 00:48:22 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.
Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.
It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.
Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
Ahh my bad sorry
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
[1] https://www.malsmith.net/wincvt/
I ran it for years on Linux.
But it can still do a lot.
The iOS version is straight up trash though if you're trying to work with multiple PDFs like bank statements on iOS.
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac
Another one is Cmd+H for hiding an app. People often minimize the current window to see the next app underneath, while hiding the current app is much more elegant and creates a lot less friction for restoring it later.
Which of these hidden champions did I forget?
ssh://soandso@whatshername.com
into virtually any app (I use TextEdit), select the text and drag it out to some Finder location. It will create the file automatically. Then just click on the file (or open it with Quicksilver, Alfred, et. al) and it will open a new Terminal window with you ssh'd to the host as that user (normal auth procedures apply).
I don't use them too much anymore because there doesn't seem to be any way to get iTerm2 to be the default app to open such files (on modern MacOS versions the application drop-down in the Finder info window is greyed out) and I don't SSH into as many machines as I once did.
EDIT: turns out you can get iTerm2 to be the default opener for ssh .inetloc files; it's just done inside iTerm itself.
Settings > Profiles > [select profile on left] > URL Schemes
Yesterday I got a email from someone telling me they ported TextEd from Objective-C to Swift so they brought it back to life https://github.com/jrcii/texted
Feedback appreciated! https://jort.app/
I was a hardcore user of TextEdit (text only mode) until SublimeText and vim replaced it. I never would have thought to need to hide the toolbar because I always loaded it as a plaintext editor and I had to go look for a way to hide it in RTF mode to verify that Drang was right about not being able to hide it. Confirmed, can't find a way to hide it. Didn't bother me before I was a plaintext person.
Love this. Humor.
Ok, number one the TextEdit bar is like 5 pixels taller so maybe being a little melodramatic here.
But straight up, it's flat out wrong to say "the Pages tool bar doesn't take space away from the document" because if those buttons weren't smashed into the title bar, the title bar would only need to be as tall as the title bar in Text Edit. It's still stealing precious vertical pixels from you, possibly even 5!
To me there is noticeable input lag when using Obsidian or IA Writer that just doesn't exist in TextEdit.app. I also could use Nvim, which I use for coding, but often don't care enough about editing while I'm drafting.
It used to. It became always-on in one of the big cat releases, I forget which one. I too wish it had this option, but given that it's about the only thing I'd change in TextEdit, I can live with it.
Truly a lot more user friendly than Microsoft Office.
Almost every layman user? - at least for the latter, as there are well known shortcuts for the former many know.
>An advantage of TextEdit that Allison points out and which I concede: TextEdit uses much less memory than Pages. I wish that weren’t the case, but I have a 48 GB MacBook Pro, so I can afford to be profligate with RAM.
You can't be profligate with the TextEdit vs Pages level RAM use on a fucking 48GB laptop? I can be way more profligate (sic) even on 16GB or 8GB laptops.
Oh, and his other issue is you can't hide TextEdit's menubar and it takes space from the document. That for one of the more streamlined, and to the point, menubars in the history of GUI software...
I'm all for a good app review or even a good app putdown, but these guy's pet peeves, which he blows up into major issues when he's picking one or the other app are really bizarre.
It’s so useful to have ultra-common stuff right at hand. I use keyboard shortcuts for some but don’t know them for others. I agree it’s a godsend for inexperienced users.
One of my top complaints about the ribbon or the sidebar stuff in pages is how hard it is to find that stuff.
And sure MacWrite didn’t show it, but it was on a 512x342 pixel screen. Adding a toolbar would take away very very precious vertical space. We can afford it now, the trade-off is different.
The article is about his personal preference, so it may not fit him well. But as a general criticism it seems very odd.
It’s like notepad + wordpad in one. Great little app.