Q: Can TextEdit have Templates?

[mmcrider]

If one were to open an iWork Pages Template, enter some text, and then save by hitting the command-s quick key, a save dialog would then open asking for a name.

Can TextEdit work similarly or be made to work similarly?

Here's my application: I review lots of agreements and there are important points I need to extract in order to do my work. I don't want to go hunting through the entire agreement to find these points. So, what I used to do in Windows is have template with some 'fields', which were nothing more than words with a colon after it. I would "fill" out this form and save it. Then, whenever I needed to know what was in the agreement, I would just open up this document.

I don't need fancy word processor functions for this. Just text.

Of course, I could make a 'template' myself by just opening a TextEdit 'document' and typing in the 'fields' and saving with the name, Template.txt. But, if I were to open this and begin working and then hit command-s, I would not be asked to enter a filename, but instead, Template.txt would be over-written with the new text.

If this isn't a native function, is there anyway this could be applied? Or, do you know of any other Text editor for Mac that would already have this functionality.

Thanks.

Matt

 

[robbieduncan]

TextEdit has no support for templates. As you note you can set up something similar yourself with the worry of overwriting the template file. I think you can easily work around this: if you create the template then set the file to be read-only then when you try and save it TextEdit should ask you for a new file name.

Note I can't try this: I'm at work and not on a Mac 🙁

If you really want a proper templates solution the entire source code for TextEdit is included as an example with the Developer Tools: you could add any functionality you wanted if you can write Cocoa/Obj-C code...

 

[mmcrider]

Thanks, Robbie. I set the attritube 'locked' and now it tells me it's locked when I go to save it. So, I answer that I don't want to over-write the locked file, which closes the dialog. Then, I do a 'save as'. This is functional, but I was hoping to make this a little more seemless.

However, that was a great idea. I think I'm off to www.rentacoder.com to see if I can find someone to write this for me.

Thanks again.

Matt