Textedit Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

OCRKit app has good idea, so-so results

by Erica Sadun (Apr 1st, 2013)

OCRKit (US$59.99) has a useful goal: converting photos into searchable PDF files (also RTF, HTML and text). You drag in photos, it produces documents. It couldn't be simpler to use. An app like this lives and dies by virtue of of its precision, however. Unfortunately, OCRKit did not shine in ...

Top 10 subtle Mountain Lion features (and a few more)

by Mike Schramm (Jul 30th, 2012)

Lifehacker has put together a list of what they call the "top 10 secret features of Mountain Lion." That's not quite right -- these features aren't secret, because it would be pretty silly to release an OS update and not tell anyone about it. But they are subtle, and this is a nice list of ...

Get Save As back on Mountain Lion's File menu easily and without hacks

by TJ Luoma (Jul 29th, 2012)

You can make the "Save As..." menu item more visible and easier to use simply by giving it a different keyboard shortcut. In 10.7 (Lion), Apple removed the 'Save As' menu item and replaced it with "Duplicate" which did not work the same way. Apple relented in 10.8 (Mountain Lion) by returning ...

Mountain Lion 101: The iCloud Document Library

by Steven Sande (Jul 25th, 2012)

One of my favorite features of Mountain Lion to demonstrate so far has been the iCloud Document Library. This is a way to store your iWork, TextEdit, and Preview documents in iCloud so that they are immediately accessible from other Macs on the same iCloud account as well as on connected iOS ...

Daily Mac App: WriteRoom

by Michael Rose (Nov 17th, 2011)

It seems every writer, coder or GTD aficionado has a favorite plain text editor on the Mac these days. For everyone who starts each day with a screenful of untitled TextEdit windows full of different short notes (that would describe my dear spouse, for the record) there's a TextMate guru, an ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: What is this "Lock" TextEdit speaks of?

by Erica Sadun (Jul 22nd, 2011)

Dear Aunt TUAW, I have a list of books that friends recommend to me. I don't update it a lot but when I do, I just want to go into the list and add new ones. Today, I was going to add M. K. Hobson's Native Star and Text Edit stopped me, saying the file was locked because I hadn't made any ...

TUAW TV Live today at 5 PM ET: Writing tools for Mac

by Steven Sande (Nov 3rd, 2010)

Monday was the start of NaNoWriMo, the annual writing fest in which authors from around the globe attempt to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I've started on my third novel, and as usual I'm having a blast thinking up characters, situations, plot lines, and just how I'm going to wrap up this ...

Mac 101: Autocomplete words in TextEdit

by Dave Caolo (Oct 28th, 2010)

More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users. For those with modest text-editing needs, Apple's TextEdit is a great choice. Did you know that it's got an autocomplete option? David Mendels points out how it works at Mac OS X Hints. As you're typing a long word, hit the ...

Unsung Snow Leopard feature: multiple-language spell checker

by Chris Rawson (Sep 4th, 2009)

OS X has had a system-wide, built-in spell checker for a while now, but until Snow Leopard, it could only check the spelling of whatever your default language was. But what if you needed to prepare a document in another language, say for a college Spanish assignment? In that case, you'd end up with ...

Friday Favorite: TextEdit

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 17th, 2009)

What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, TextEdit, an app that ships with every Mac. TextEdit is, of course, a simple text editing tool like Notepad or WordPad on Windows. But there's a lot more to "simple text editing" that you ...

Create a clutter-free writing environment for free

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Mar 23rd, 2009)

When WriteRoom debuted, many of us were impressed with the software and the idea of a focused interface that just lets you write. WriteRoom allows you to write on a screen of nothing but text, and the default view mimics the way many of us used with our first word processor (myself included): green ...

Mac 101: Shorten text using the Summarize Service

by Cory Bohon (Nov 19th, 2008)

Have you ever been reading a long article and wished you could somehow magically make it shorter? With a Mac OS X service called "Summarize," you can do with a few simple clicks. In many applications such as Safari, Pages, and TextEdit, you can select a block of text and click the application name ...

Sidenote keeps your notes on the side

by Mike Schramm (Jun 19th, 2008)

So for quite a while now I've been using nothing more complicated than TextEdit to keep a list of what I've got on my plate any given day -- I stuck an "Untitled" text file in the top corner of my screen, and just kept it open all the time. But I wasn't quite satisfied with that -- at the end of the ...

Leopard Love: "Go To" in TextEdit

by Erica Sadun (Oct 29th, 2007)

TextEdit doesn't get much love. BBEdit, SubEthaEdit, and so forth grab the spotlight and all the attention. But I'm a TextEdit gal. I love the Emacs-like support and the price tag. For years now, I've resorted to Lorax's textextras to get "go to line". It's critical when you're debugging and you ...

Leopard's TextEdit Thinks Different

by Scott McNulty (Aug 29th, 2007)

Who would have thought that one of Apple's most memorable ad campaigns and Leopard's most talked about features would collide? That's right, Think Different and Resolution Independence have joined forces to bring us Leopard's all new TextEdit icon. Head on over to NSLog to read the lovely letter ...