Using Textedit On Mac

Create an HTML file. In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose File New, then choose Format Make Plain Text. Enter the HTML code. Choose File Save, type a name followed by the extension.html (for example, enter index.html), then click Save. When prompted about the extension to use, click “Use.html.”. Use TextEdit On Mac To Edit HTML Files. If playback doesn't begin shortly, try restarting your device. You're signed out.

New Mac users may not know about TextEdit, a simple but deep text editing and word processing tool that comes with your Mac. You can use TextEdit to create documents in cases when a full word processor like Pages or Microsoft Word isn't necessary. TextEdit has two modes: plain text and rich text. You can use the first for writing, notes and coding. You can use the second for word processing. TextEdit also allows you to open Microsoft Word documents which is useful if you are sent one but haven't bought Word.

Check out A Beginner’s Guide to TextEdit at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: If you're new to Mac you may not even know about one of the most useful apps that comes with your computer. It's an app called TextEdit. It's a basic text editor that actually has a lot of functionality. For about 80% to 90% of all the things that people use word processors for you can just use TextEdit. You don't need Pages or Microsoft Word.Now you're not going to find TextEdit in the Dock by default. You have to go to either Launchpad or the Applications folder. I'm going to use Spotlight to search for TextEdit and launch it. You're faced here with a file open dialogue. You can select a file to open. I'm going to click New Document and it will open up a basic TextEdit window and I can start typing right away. Now there are two modes in TextEdit. This is the plain text mode. Notice there are no options here for changing fonts, styles, anything. You're just typing text and that's all you can do here. Now for a lot of things this is very useful. Typing quick notes or for just doing some basic writing that say you're going to copy and paste into an online post or another document. It's great. If you're a coder you can use this actually for creating HTML, scripts, and other things. The other mode, if you go to Format you can see Make Rich Text. I can convert this to Rich Text. Now I see all those options up here. I can select text. I can change its font. I can center. I can change its size, make something bold. I can add other lines. Maybe just make this one something else here. So you can basically do what you do with word processors most of the time. It's all available here in Rich Text Format. In Format you can go to Make Plain Text and you'll see you'll be warned because it's going to get rid of all the styling. So you can switch between the two of them. Under Preferences you can decide whether you want your default document to be Rich Text or Plain Text, plus a whole bunch of other options including the font used by the plain text editor here. Other Options here as well especially if you're a coder. What type of document you need the Plain Text documents to be. So there's a lot you can do here. You can even create bullet lists. You can insert tables. So you can see here this little interface for the type of table you want. I'm just going to Undo back to there. You can, of course, Save, Export as a PDF, Share in different ways. You can Print. You can do all the basic stuff you can do with other documents and things you would expect. You can even use Tabs here and go full screen mode for kind of a good writing environment. There's a lot of different things you can do with TextEdit. It's pretty full featured. It's a lot easier to get around it. You can pretty much play around for five or ten minutes and see all of the features and understand how to use them which makes it better than some word processors. You can play around for days in Microsoft Word and still not hit every feature.Another cool things that TextEdit does is it allows you to open up Microsoft Word documents. Because while Mac users all have Pages, it's just free, and we can all open up most Mac documents sometimes people sent you Word documents. You don't need to edit them in Word. You don't need to see everything in perfect formatting. You just need to see what the contents are. I get emails like that all the time and if I didn't have Microsoft Word how would I open them up. Well, you can open them up here in TextEdit. So I've got a word.doc here. You can, you know, use the File, Open function to open that. I'm going to drag and drop it into the Dock here onto TextEdit. It will open up this word document. The formatting is not perfect. There's revision notes turned on in this document but I don't see them here because TextEdit doesn't have revision notes. But I can read all the text. It comes out perfectly fine. So that's really handy if you get Word documents you can use TextEdit to go and open them up without having to buy Word or ask the person sending it to please send you a PDF or some other format.

Using Textedit On Mac Pro

TextEdit is a free word processor that has long been included as part of Macintosh operating systems (it was originally created for the NeXTSTEP operating system and came to Apple as part of the company’s acquisition of NeXT and its software, which would soon become the foundation of OS X). Despite its relatively basic interface, TextEdit has grown into a powerful application that can easily handle most simple word processing requirements. TextEdit is able to offer these capabilities thanks to robust support for rich text formatting, which allows users to change fonts, sizes, colors, and more — in essence, the bulk of what most consumers think of when they picture more advanced word processing applications such as Apple Pages and Microsoft Word.

TextEdit offers powerful rich text formatting options

But sometimes it’s best to use TextEdit Plain Text Mode, which eliminates all formatting and, you guessed it, produces only plain text. This can be useful for removing the formatting from copied text, working with code, or reducing the complexity and file sizes of documents that don’t need the benefits of rich text formatting.

Convert Rich Text to Plain Text in TextEdit

TextEdit opens a new document in rich text mode by default, but you can easily convert a document to plain text at any time. To do so, make sure the document you wish to convert is open and selected, then go to Format > Make Plain Text in the TextEdit menu bar. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-T.
You’ll get a confirmation box warning you that making a document plain text will remove all formatting; make sure you heed it carefully. If you select OK, everything except for your document’s text will be removed. This includes custom fonts, font sizes and styles, colors, bold, italicized, and underlined formatting, embedded images, and hyperlinks. The result will be clean, simple, plain text.

Converting a document to plain text removes all formatting

You can always convert a TextEdit plain text document back to a rich text document, but that only applies to new formatting; you won’t get your original formatting back. So, with this in mind, make sure you

Using Textedit On Mac Free

really want to convert from rich text to plain text, and make a backup copy of the document if you’re not completely sure.

Use Plain Text by Default in TextEdit

Using Textedit On Mac Download

If you’re a budding programmer or blogger and you want a plain text environment to write code or HTML, you’ll likely want to use TextEdit plain text mode almost exclusively. Instead of switching each new document to plain text mode manually using the steps above, why not set TextEdit to open in plain text mode by default?
To use plain text by default in TextEdit, go to TextEdit > Preferences in the menu bar. On the New Document tab, select Plain Text in the Format section. You don’t even need to close the preference window to initiate the change. As soon as you click the Plain Text button, all new TextEdit windows will open in Plain Text Mode.
Alternatively, of course, you can go back to this preference window and select Rich Text instead if you ever want to switch back to rich text by default. Of note, you can also use this preference window to set other useful default options, such as enabling or disabling text wrap, the default font for both plain and rich text documents, and the default size of new TextEdit windows.
If you ever make too many changes and want to revert to the original configuration settings, just click Restore All Defaults at the bottom of the preferences window.
There are many powerful third party apps dedicated to plain text and coding on the Mac — options like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, Sublime Text, and Coda come to mind — but TextEdit is free, always available, and quite capable of handling all the basics. By properly navigating the appropriate uses for rich and plain text, TextEdit should be your first stop for plain text editing in OS X.