TextEdit and the relief of simple software
77 comments
·October 24, 2025al_borland
jesse__
I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..
mananaysiempre
If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much untenable (and while RTF can use both UCS-2 and Windows codepages, Word seems to stick to—potentially multiple—codepages if it can, presumably for compatibility). That said, Microsoft always intended RTF to be Word’s exchange and archival format (unlike DOC, which was a mess they did not want to document), so it has enough of an official spec that extracting text, at least, is very possible.
QuantumNomad_
> many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit
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.
jrmg
And for a few years now (since ‘real’ emacs was removed, I think) ‘mg’, which is a terminal-based eMacs-alike.
mfro
Pico is also still included (and aliased to nano, funnily)
ksherlock
Until Catalina, emacs and nano were also included.
jshier
nano is now an alias for UW pico, since Apple won't take any new versions of GPL tools.
schmidtleonard
ed is old, but osx bash is ancient
giancarlostoro
I'm sort of surprised they didn't just build a bash compatible shell.
giancarlostoro
Probably Disk Corruption, my wife's 2008 Macbook has RTF files that still open, even on newer macs (after copying them), on Linux and Windows.
xyzzy_plugh
I do this so religiously that when I'm setting up a new system I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
TextEdit is pretty great.
Lammy
> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
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...
Wowfunhappy
Assuming it was disk corruption, as seems likely, it's not immediately obvious to me why plain text would have been any better?
al_borland
Plain text wouldn't be better in that case, but then I'd know it was corruption instead of questioning if there was a spec change and trying to find a compatible piece of software that would still open it.
wat10000
RTF is a textual format. You can open it in a plain text editor to see whether it's completely trashed or not. If it isn't, then you can even recover the raw text from it without too much difficulty.
ravetcofx
Try opening them in Libreoffice, it's often able to open crusy old documents.
al_borland
I think I tried that. I'm not sure if I still have them, I'll have to go look, but I tried every app I could think of. I spent a few hours on it last time I looked. There was a paragraph here or there that would show up, with a bunch of garbage around it for the rest of the file.
Razengan
It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.
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.
vlark
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While 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.
hbn
I figured something like this didn't need to be stated but then Microsoft added Copilot to Notepad
No this is not a joke. Notepad has a giant always-present Copilot button now
andai
When I heard they rewrote Notepad in JavaScript I knew we had entered the End Times...
3eb7988a1663
Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.
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).
card_zero
They put it in Paint, too. That's when I rediscovered Irfanview.
natebc
You think that's great, wait till you rediscover VLC!
wingworks
If you're a Mac person, 100% try out iina if you haven't yet. Kinda like VLC, but way more Mac like.
wingworks
Irfanview is amazing!
politelemon
Apple has added it to textedit too with their equivalent intelligence enabled. You're throwing shade in the wrong direction.
al_borland
Apple added it as a system-wide service available in any text field. There isn't a dedicated button and branding for it within TextEdit. It's there because it's runs inside macOS.
cosmic_cheese
And it has a global off switch, too. Turn it off and it vanishes everywhere. Fully removing Copilot on the other hand is a constant battle.
LeoPanthera
I'd like to highly recommend CotEditor: https://coteditor.com
It's open source, fully Mac native, no Electron, fast, and small. I use it almost every hour of every day.
maratc
Coteditor is cool, but it's not TextMate though :(
ryanianian
I absolutely adore TextMate, but it hasn't kept up. It will often fail to respond to the `mate` terminal command, or it will take many seconds to start even on my mostly vanilla M4 Max.
Lammy
Needs moar BBEdit. It's my daily driver on my M3 MBP at work and it and its `bbedit` shell helper (which I alias to `bb` for brevity) are never something I have to wait on: https://www.barebones.com/support/bbedit/current_notes.html
nh2
Just two days ago my friend an I lost 5 minutes trying to disable line wrapping in TextEdit. We failed.
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.
dchest
Ackchyually, TextEdit now has built-in AI as any other native macOS textview control if Apple Intelligence is turned on. It even autocompletes your sentences.
It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
frizlab
> It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.
Like any (most) actual native macOS applications.
Aaron2222
You can fix this with:
defaults write -g NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false
defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool falsestblack
TextEdit pet peeve: closing an empty window prompts the save dialog. Always.
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.
alain94040
Just tried: open TextEdit, new document (creates an empty document). Close it, no save dialog.
frizlab
Yup, same. Save dialog only happens if I have added some text (but will still happen if I remove the text I added, which I expected anyways).
null
DavidPiper
Happens for me too. I assume it's an iCloud thing (I vaguely remember the behaviour changing around the time I set up iCloud years ago), but I haven't ever bothered trying to figure out a way to turn it off...
Doctor_Fegg
My favourite Mac app for over 20 years.
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.
krackers
>Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline
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)
fortylove
<this comment doesn't really add anything, but thought I'd share anyways for whatever reason>
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?
kayodelycaon
(It 's TextMate. RIP)
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.
jonnyysmith
TextMate is also nice since it has left file browser which comes handy and preserves last open file/folders in the view.
skinnymuch
Rmate is really nice to open remote files locally in Textmate.
prvc
>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.
Man, if he only knew...
For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.
Or if you want that as your default: I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.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.