Friday Favorite: TextEdit

We had been using Word for a process where we had to count characters on a line. Now Word no longer has that feature and someone said we had to use a text editor. I went to TextEdit but didn't see that feature. Is the feature there, or can anyone recommend another text editor application for the Mac that can count characters? Thanks, Bill

TextEdit is my most-used app after Safari, for saving bits of text and longer docs on the computer, notes to self, records of jobs, invoices, information of all kinds, etc. I set up Macs for people, and include docs explaining the computer and many things about it, all done in TextEdit, with pictures and live weblinks. TextEdit is very capable, and fun to explore and work with.

Another nice thing about TextEdit is that Apple's open-sourced it, so anyone can take the code and build on it; two results are Bean (http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html) and iText Express (http://homepage.mac.com/lightway/iText/iTextExpress/TryiTxtExp.html); both add features like adjustable margins and headers/footers/page numbers to make a fine basic word processor. Bean has been compared with the late, lamented WriteNow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WriteNow); while iText Express will do vertical Japanese/Chinese text.

RTF is so annoying. Ever tried to work with tables then you know. Is from Microsoft, maybe that's why.

Yeah, why ditch quicksilver?

I'm with the 2nd poster. Editing inbox.txt? So how to use a browser-default text editor to keep a list of to do items? Surely that's just pointing out the obvious?

And keeping your code snippets in a text file using the browser-default text editor? That's not exactly a revelation.

Unless I'm missing something? Does inbox.txt have some higher function than just being a text file where you're manually dumping a list?

Speaking of QS, what's up with it? Has any progress been made on the rewrite/Dev since it went open source and moved to GoogleCode?

Thanks, Mike. That works fine. It never occurred to me that I'd need to put TextEdit into a special mode to edit text files.

Is there some way to create a new .txt document directly from TextEdit? I keep using it to create new text files, forgetting that it only wants to save in .rtf, so then I end up having to rename the file to .txt and edit out the rtf cruft. It amazes me that the "save as" doesn't have a .txt format option.

1.) IF you’re on Mac OS X 10.5 you don’t really need QS; just invoke Spotlight type tex… and (if you set in the System Prefs.>Spotlight to list Apps first) voila! TextEdit starts. Well ok, you can much more w/ QS -- but for me it’s to "overloaded".

2.) You don’t "need" the Service Menu: just drag’n’drop marked text from eg. Safari to any text aware application -- eg. TextEdit, Mail, BBEdit 9.x, etc. besides TextMate which is not working that way -- and here you go again: new document (Mail: new e-mail) opens w/ the dropped text, incl. styles and links in case of TextEdit, and if you choose as drag’n’drop application Safari: you’ll get a Google-Search w/ the choosen text. Also works if you drag’n’drop text to icon while doing cmd-tab to change/choose application.

TextEdit... Seriously?!

You've probably never used BBedit back when they used to have a "lite" version. If you can still locate it on the web, BBedit Lite 6.1 for Mac OS X is well worth the search effort.

It's sleek, powerful and fast and opens literally anything. (as much as a raw text editor should, anyway...) It even runs under 10.5.

Also, the editor features a slew of other features, such as GREP searching of a file.

Best of all... none of that Rich Text Format crap!