Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Most popular alternative to TextEdit?

S

sumer9

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 4, 2007
12
0
TE is maddening. I keep thinking I've fixed it, but next time it reverts.
In Preferences it allows you to say e.g. Helvetica 14 for Rich text, but when you paste something from a web page it appears as some wretched serif'd font, and TINY.

I now understand why: it wants to be a WYSIWYG word processor instead of a Text Editor!
It initially chooses a font and size to be sure to be able to make pasted lines fit your window, and adds linebreaks.

I know you can change this to "Wrap to Page" (I guess it defaults to A4 or US Letter or somesuch), but it still ignores what you said in Preferences.

Another maddening feature is that when you paste some text just after something you Bolded, the pasted text is bolded. Even if you put in a space before pasting.

All I want is something that loads FAST to make a quick note (not "Stickies" please), allows a tiny amount of style - Bold is all I need really - and lets you paste from a source like a browser window as PLAIN text.

But please don't call it a text editor if it's a WYSIWYG tool!

Suggestions?
 
sumer9 said:
TE is maddening. I keep thinking I've fixed it, but next time it reverts.
In Preferences it allows you to say e.g. Helvetica 14 for Rich text, but when you paste something from a web page it appears as some wretched serif'd font, and TINY.
Click to expand...
That's because when you simply copy and paste, you're pasting the format from the website, as well. If you want it to use your default format and font in TextEdit, choose Edit > Paste and Match Style.
sumer9 said:
Another maddening feature is that when you paste some text just after something you Bolded, the pasted text is bolded. Even if you put in a space before pasting.
Click to expand...
Again, even if you put a space, the space is still in the bold format. If you want the next text pasted not to be bold, simply press Command-B to unbold before you paste.
sumer9 said:
and lets you paste from a source like a browser window as PLAIN text.
Click to expand...
ScreenCap 4.PNG​
Before you decide you need to replace TextEdit, it might be helpful if you took the time to learn how it works.
 
Last edited:
Thanks you guys. I think in the past I tried BBedit, TextWrangler & TextMate and maybe Smultron. Some editors are aimed at developers, and we all have our favourites (I use KeditW under Parallels Desktop).

What I was referring to was not a word-processor, not a programmer's editor, but a Text editor for quickly making and adding to Notes, often pasted off web pages. Somehow I thought TE was just an ancient "functionally stabilised" orphan.

GGJstudios put me right on one thing: for YEARS I've eschewed "Paste & Match Style" because it sounded like the opposite of what I wanted - sounded like it would match the style of the Source (maybe html), which had become the default. Unbolding with Cmd-B before pasting is a useful tip, so obvious I should have thought it.

But GGJ you've reminded me of another beef about TE: Format > Make Plain Text hits the whole doc. It doesn't let you select some text and make it "style-less", i.e. plain text.

Don't forget that for a QUICK note you want something that loads fast, not some ponderous feature-rich bloated monster.

Maybe I should look at HTML editors. On the heavy side I like KeditW for that; not only is it powerful, you can use Rexx (actually Kex) for macros.

Are there any quick, lightweight html editors?
 
Last edited:
I've used BBedit, and Textmate, but I recently was able to get in on UltraEdit beta and I've been using that. When it goes gold, I highly recommend that application over any of them.

I use UltraEdit on my PC at work, and its awesome, and I'm liking how they did it for OSX, not just a simple blind port, but embracing the OSX way of doing things
 
"What I was referring to was not a word-processor, not a programmer's editor, but a Text editor for quickly making and adding to Notes, often pasted off web pages. Somehow I thought TE was just an ancient "functionally stabilised" orphan."

Try "Tex-Edit+"
http://www.tex-edit.com/

Easy writing, easy editing, and some nice "text handling tools" built right into the menus.
 
maflynn said:
I've used BBedit, and Textmate, but I recently was able to get in on UltraEdit beta and I've been using that. When it goes gold, I highly recommend that application over any of them.

I use UltraEdit on my PC at work, and its awesome, and I'm liking how they did it for OSX, not just a simple blind port, but embracing the OSX way of doing things
Click to expand...

I second that. I use UltraEdit on the PC and it is one of the best general purpose text editors around. As much as I love open source, UltraEdit beats Notepad++ easily.

UltraEdit is one of the application I greatly miss on the mac and I can't wait for them to release the mac version (don't have the beta, unfortunately).
 
Well that was interesting.
I’m using Tex Edit + at this moment. Seems nice & lite and does have Bold for selected bits, and doesn’t continue bold, GGJ, when you paste after some bold. Surprising pause before it loads, shame it’s limited to 32k, and the only Prefs I tried to change -default window size- doesn’t work. And it Quit Unexpectedly on Cmd-Q. It might be a bit buggy?

Sea Monkey I’m definitely not interested in. It’s far more than a simple text editor.

Dashcode isn’t on my Macbook, I don’t load the optional stuff because I’m not a developer, and I certainly don’t want a whole dev environment package.

Must try Notepad++. But often something that needs scaffolding like Wine gets to be clunky?

I looked at the 10 Best but there wasn’t much that isn’t already covered.

UltraEdit for me wouldn’t compete with Xedit/Kedit in Windows (just their All/Less/More commands are so valuable), and when the Mac version arrives of course it will have scaffolding. But it might not be elephantine. We’ll have to see.

For now I’ll continue with Tex Edit+, unless its pause before appearing gets too annoying.

Thanks again you guys, there definitely are viable alternatives to TextEdit.

Notepad++ is indeed clunky. Sorry!

As I expected, MacVim is Vi based, so needing lots of scaffolding. Not the speedy simple thing I'm wanting.

Tex-Edit Plus still looks best so far.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
"the only Prefs I tried to change -default window size- doesn’t work."

Did you try:
- Launch Tex-Edit+
- If it opens with a new (blank) window, RESIZE it to how you wish all new documents to be sized
- Open preferences
- Click the "doc" panel
- In "Default Window Size", choose "Custom (Top Window)"

TE+ "takes its cue" from the size of the document window that's already open in the background.

It may be a bit slower to load because it's running under Rosetta.
 
You might like Pages. It's a simple yet reasonably powerful word processor.

It should appear on its own for ~ $20 in the new Mac app store soon. I think you can download a trial of iWork too.
 
@fishrrman: "Did you try:
- Launch Tex-Edit+
- If it opens with a new (blank) window, RESIZE it to how you wish all new documents to be sized
- Open preferences
- Click the "doc" panel
- In "Default Window Size", choose "Custom (Top Window)"
"
Of course I didn't, it's at the bottom of the dialog and pretty unclear as to what it means. I tried Medium then Large. I mean Good grief, 5 steps as well! That's the opposite of intuitive, user-friendly etc. If Medium & Large don't work then they shouldn't be in there.

@adrian-oconnor: As I said, I DON'T want a WP.
But concerning iWork, are you serious? Recently I tried it. It took more than an hour to download on a broadband line. When I found it way too clunky so I uninstalled, it took more than 10 hours to empty the trash bin. (Macbook 2GHz, 2GB DDR2, OS X 10.6.5)
 
After trying it for a while, Tex-Edit Plus just doesn't behave as you'd expect. For example that ludicrous stuff GGJ cited. Fancy hiding Paste Unstyled in a 2nd-level menu "Copy & Paste Special". I can't recommend it.

So OK, I think we're seeing a gap in the market, specifically for OS X ordinary users (developers everywhere are richly provided for).

Linux etc are well provided for, because a lot of people there are developers. Their work doesn't port well to OS X because of the need for treacly scaffolding.

With Windows it's so easy: Wordpad for WYSIWYG and Notepad for quick notes.

I guess OS X has enough structured, styled editors, and there's html, OOo, Google Docs, plus any amount of stuff for developers. TextEdit RTF covers the Wordpad case.

What is lacking for OS X is a Tiny raw text editor, intuitive and easily learnt. Well thought out menus and preferences that actually say and do what you'd expect. No idiosyncrasies. LAUNCHES FAST like Notepad in Windows (or Tedit in DOS and OS/2). DEFAULT Paste behaviour should be style-free, but able to take Cmd-B for selected text. MAYBE some optional fonty stuff. But text following any style and fonts pasted in should immediately revert to raw text (unless the whole doc is being styled).

And look, it should never attempt to second-guess the user by adjusting fonts so that Newlines match the source lines. And don't second-guess Printing. Let Cmd-P do its usual thing, per what's in Preferences, the user can always opt to Preview the result.

Ought to be free, but if it's done right a modest price after a 30day trial would easily succeed.

Maybe what we need is a competition.

.
 
textedit drove me crazy, until I made one change.

In preferences, new document, I set it to open new documents as plain text. Now everything stays plain text in that document until I change it. Of course once you change font format (to bold for example) it probably gets changed into a formatted document - I'm sorry, but *bold* text is not just plain text. If you want plain text, don't use *bold*. I use * as needed instead ;)
 
@ lucifiel I liked Slidepad. It looked neat, quick & handy. Then I noted that even if you hadn't opted for it, mousing beyond the edge of the screen brought it out. And then I noted that in some strange circumstances, maybe connected with an open Terminal window, you can't always get rid of it with Alt-space - it just bounces off the edge of the screen. Then I found Cmd-Q in TextEdit brought it out unbidden. And I think launching FireFox for the 1st time since Boot also made it dodge into view.
Is it buggy? Is it dodgy? Is it a Trojan? Should we trust your userid?
 
@ dknightd: I've always had TE prefs set to start a new doc as text.
What you're reading right now is html. I don't know if this is going to work, 'cos I'm trying to patch html inside html. But I want to show you that you can have a tiny bit of style with the whole doc still being readable in ANY editor. Try entering the following 3 lines:

<p>
Here's some text.
Here's some more. This <b>word</b> is in Bold, nothing else is.

Then save as "mydoc.html", Quit, then double-click mydoc.

It's not wysiwyg, the lines have been flowed together. You can resize the window as you like and see it change. But that won't affect printing. You can see how by using Cmd-P then clicking Preview in the Print dialog.
The whole thing will be in your default Browser font, so in that sense it's not raw text. You can change your html default font but I'm not going into that. I just wanted to show you that TE's insistence on changing the whole doc to RTF if you Cmd-B on just 1 character is not the only way.
 
sumer9 said:
<p>
Here's some text.
Here's some more. This <b>word</b> is in Bold, nothing else is.

Then save as "mydoc.html", Quit, then double-click mydoc.
Click to expand...

What you've created is an HTML document that, when viewed in an application that understands the markup, shows you what you want to see. This is no different than an rtf document created by TextEdit or any other rtf enabled text editor. Open an rtf document in a plain text editor and you will see all of the markup that formats that document as well.

You might just as well have written:

{\rtf1\ansi{\fonttbl\f0\fswiss Helvetica;}\f0\pard
Here is some text.
Here's some more. This {\b word} is in Bold, nothing else is.\par
}

Then save that as "mydoc.rtf", Quit, then double click mydoc.rtf.

That produces exactly the same results as your example, except it is done as an rtf document rather than a html document.

I think you just need to understand that the rtf format, just like the html format, is still a plain text file. It will be displayed by the application in which it is opened according to that application's rules for handling and interpreting the markup within the document. So you could in fact create a document in plain text and use the rtf markup to format it the way you want in any text editor that supports plain text, including TextEdit. That'd be kind of a pain though, so most text editors now allow you to apply that markup invisibly and show the results right away, which seems to be what you were complaining about with TextEdit in the beginning.

The bottom line is that I don't think there is a text editor out there that behaves the way you describe because the people that make them understand how/why they work. If you want plain text, use plain text mode in whatever editor you like. If you want ANY KIND OF FORMATTING AT ALL then you have to decide what kind you are going to use and grab a text editor you like that supports at least that format.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back