How to get TextMate to be completely plain text no colors nothing?

[skymacdave]

I'm coming from Windows with it's valiant Notepad app, which is like 99% just plain text, and I want that on the Mac, and the best I've found is TextMate, but I pasted some HTML and it colored the syntax and put background colors on it... and I just want a plain flat raw pure text editor.

I'm not seeing any options for setting this, and this forum here appears to be the best way to ask about it.

 

[treekram]

In the TextEdit app open a new document, then select "Format" from the top menubar menu, then "Make Plain Text" (the shortcut is Shift-Cmd-T). In the Text Edit Preferences, in the "Options" section, you can select various options such as "Correct spelling automatically" (or not). In the System Preferences app, if you are using Sierra or later, under the "Text" tab, there are options as well if you don't want the OS to muck with what you type, incorrect or not.

 

[skymacdave]

In the TextEdit app open a new document, then select "Format" from the top menubar menu, then "Make Plain Text" (the shortcut is Shift-Cmd-T). In the Text Edit Preferences, in the "Options" section, you can select various options such as "Correct spelling automatically" (or not). In the System Preferences app, if you are using Sierra or later, under the "Text" tab, there are options as well if you don't want the OS to muck with what you type, incorrect or not.

There's no "Format" in the top menu bar. There's File, Edit, View, Navigate, Text, File Browser, Bundles, Window, Help, and there's no Format in any of their sub-menus, except for Reformat under Text, but it doesn't do what I'm looking for.

I'm using the latest version of TextMate on the latest version of iMac.

 

[smirking]

There's no "Format" in the top menu bar.

@treekram didn't quite say that right. He was telling you to use TextEdit instead or maybe he didn't notice you said "TextMate" instead of TextEdit.

Anyway, he's got a point. If all you want is something that's like a NotePad equivalent, you don't need TextMate. Just use TextEdit, which is free and part of MacOS. You just need to set it to be plain text and it'll be just like NotePad.

 

[treekram]

I was aware the OP is using TextMate, but I just assumed that they looked at TextEdit (and knew what it was) and couldn't get it to work as a plain-text editor. I guess that was the wrong assumption. TextEdit is in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Being new to the MacOS, you can also press on the magnifying glass icon in the right top corner and type in "textedit" and press the Enter key.

 

[skymacdave]

I was aware the OP is using TextMate, but I just assumed that they looked at TextEdit (and knew what it was) and couldn't get it to work as a plain-text editor. I guess that was the wrong assumption. TextEdit is in the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Being new to the MacOS, you can also press on the magnifying glass icon in the right top corner and type in "textedit" and press the Enter key.

Oh, I didn't notice you said TextEdit instead of TextMate... yes, I did have TextEdit before TextMate but decided to use it as a rich text editor and TextMate as a plain text editor, before realizing TextMate did syntax highlighting on HTML.

 

[purgatori_sakkara]

The presence or absence of syntax highlighting does not determine whether you are working with plain text or not. In fact, if your text editor activates syntax highlighting, it's a pretty good indication that you're not working with plain text, but instead with a markup/programming language. If you don't want syntax highlighting for HTML (which is not plain text) in Textmate, you likely need to disable/remove the bundle for HTML. See here: https://hiltmon.com/blog/2013/11/09/textmate-2-basics/

 

[skymacdave]

The presence or absence of syntax highlighting does not determine whether you are working with plain text or not. In fact, if your text editor activates syntax highlighting, it's a pretty good indication that you're not working with plain text, but instead with a markup/programming language. If you don't want syntax highlighting for HTML (which is not plain text) in Textmate, you likely need to disable/remove the bundle for HTML. See here: https://hiltmon.com/blog/2013/11/09/textmate-2-basics/

I thought plain text meant no syntax highlighting... I only stated the latter to make it clear what I was running into. Plain text also includes any rich text formatting like Bold or Italics etc. I just want plain text as plain as you can get.

I may look at any sort of text or file, that may or may not contain any type of programming syntax... I don't want the editor to do anything but plain text, so I'm hoping there's a better solution than disabling every possible programming language bundle in the editor...

 

[purgatori_sakkara]

I thought plain text meant no syntax highlighting... I only stated the latter to make it clear what I was running into. Plain text also includes any rich text formatting like Bold or Italics etc. I just want plain text as plain as you can get.

I may look at any sort of text or file, that may or may not contain any type of programming syntax... I don't want the editor to do anything but plain text, so I'm hoping there's a better solution than disabling every possible programming language bundle in the editor...

No. Plain text is just text that does not store any information in its file format about typeface (though it *does* store information about encoding---e.g., UTF-8), and which cannot render graphics and the like. Text editors and IDE's (e.g., Emacs, Vim, Sublime Tex, Textmate, etc.) all operate in plain text mode in the sense that they do not write formatting information back to the files that they are working in. This includes syntax highlighting, and the display of any graphics referenced in, say, the <img> tags of your HTML file. Notepad is not more plain text than these other editors, it's just a more barebones editor that lacks things like syntax highlighting, auto indent, auto-completion, in-line preview, etc. etc. that make working with various programming and markup/down languages easier. In either case, though, you are working with plain text in terms of what you are actually saving to a file, and then that file either renders to an output format when viewed in an appropriate viewer (a web browser, in the case of HTML) or is otherwise compiled in some fashion or other. This is very different from rich-text, a-la .docx and .pages, where there is no separation between content and formatting.

In terms of editors that come preinstalled on the Mac without any bells and whistles, I think Nano would probably fit the bill:

However, it is a terminal app, and there is a learning curve if you're coming from something like Notepad. There's also Sublime Text and Atom, which don't come preinstalled, but I'm fairly sure (in Sublime's case, completely sure) that they allow you to toggle syntax highlighting on and off without having to mess around with bundles---although if you don't want syntax highlighting, there'd be no harm in removing said bundles from Textmate.

 

[skymacdave]

OK so it's great that TextMate saves plain text, but there's still just the issue of readability when the editor modifies the plain text to show differently like with syntax highlighting and the like, especially if something unexpected happens and things show misformatted.

I'm used to working with just a plain text editor that does not modify the text in any way (including during display), so is there not just a switch somewhere to show only plain text in the GUI text editors like TextMate or TextEdit etc?

Nano is something I've tried but it's just far more difficult than the plain-text GUI editors I used in Windows (Notepad, Notepad++) so I'm looking for a GUI text editor that will not modify the text even during display and gives me the basic keyboard/mouse features a text editor would (also without IDE/word-processing features like code suggestions or completion or spell-check etc).

 

[purgatori_sakkara]

See my previous recommendations, Atom and Sublime. I think you will struggle to find a text editor as barebones as Notepad/Notepad++ outside of the terminal, though.

 

[skymacdave]

See my previous recommendations, Atom and Sublime. I think you will struggle to find a text editor as barebones as Notepad/Notepad++ outside of the terminal, though.

Atom and Sublime do plain text by default on a Mac? Without all the extra word-processing/IDE garbage like hover pop-ups and suggestions and auto-complete etc? Those are code editors whereas the other ones we've been talking about are text editors that have been enhanced to work with code... so I'm hoping there's some better suggestions, like just a toggle to make any of these editors just be used for plain text with any file type (even without an extension).

So far I'm getting TextMate to work OK enough for the situations I'm in, but sometimes it does enhanced stuff which just gets in the way and I have to go hunt down again how to disable that feature for that kind of file or text etc.

 

[purgatori_sakkara]

Incorrect. They're also text editors with enhancements for working with code. Something like Visual Studio is a dedicated code editor (+ IDE). Also, these features are hardly 'garbage' for people working with code---they're just not what you're used to.

As for a toggle that disables syntax highlighting, etc., as I've already stated, Sublime has just that. Spell-checking and auto-complete can also be disabled. I'd imagine Atom is similar, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure.

 

[skymacdave]

Incorrect. They're also text editors with enhancements for working with code. Something like Visual Studio is a dedicated code editor (+ IDE). Also, these features are hardly 'garbage' for people working with code---they're just not what you're used to.

As for a toggle that disables syntax highlighting, etc., as I've already stated, Sublime has just that. Spell-checking and auto-complete can also be disabled. I'd imagine Atom is similar, but I haven't used it enough to know for sure.

OK that's what I thought, Atom, Sublime, and VS Code are not plain text editors by default, they are code editors... so again, I'm looking for just a plain text editor for a Mac or anything that has a toggle to make it behave as a plain text editor.

"Garbage" is subjective to the fact that I need a plain text editor and not a code editor or word processor; I hope that makes sense that I'm not calling features you like "garbage" because that has nothing to do with whether they're good features or not it only has to do with the fact that they get in the way of plain text editing... remember that I'm not coding here I'm just trying to view or make small edits to ANY kind of file with text in it without having all of the code/word editor "GARBAGE" in it.

With Sublime you only mentioned "I'm fairly sure (in Sublime's case, completely sure) that they allow you to toggle syntax highlighting on and off", not that it has just that... so I can investigate that, but so far it seems like TextMate or TextEdit are closer to just a plain text editor, I'm just not finding yet (in the app or online) how to just flat-out make it just a plain text editor.

Anyways, I'm turning notifications off for this thread as it isn't progressing.