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 a document with pretty much every single word underlined in red, with no reliable way to spell check it.

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 might imagine, especially when TextEdit connects to services and other apps. I'm going to show you a few cool things you can do with TextEdit: create an inbox, use it as a development tool, or grab snippets of text on the go.

First, you should know that TextEdit defaults to the .rtf format. If you're not familiar with it, RTF is "rich text" and, unlike the .txt files generated by something like NotePad, RTF includes formatting, like bold or italics or bullet lists. "Plain text" .txt files are pretty much just the basic ASCII characters and paragraph breaks. So what? Well, if you want things to look pretty, you'll stick with .rtf, a format which is easy to share across platforms. Side note: did you know TextEdit will open Word documents? It isn't perfect, but it works if you don't have Word on your machine. The older .txt format is better for coding or when you don't need or can't have formatting.

To create an inbox, I suggest the simpler .txt format. What I used to do was set up Quicksilver to easily append to an inbox.txt file, and I used GeekTool to pin that .txt file to my desktop. You could also use LaunchBar to append, and I'm sure there's a way to whip up an AppleScript, but I never bothered. Instead, when I ditched Quicksilver, I started keeping the text file in the Dock, and I just open it up to add items. All this is portable, indexed by Spotlight, and fully cross-platform compatible.

Next up: munging HTML with TextEdit, and grabbing snippets of text from any app and dropping them into a file.

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 text on a black screen. Still, if all you want is a screen of text with very little interface, here's a free and quick solution.

Start with Backdrop, a simple application for obfuscating your desktop or other applications. You can get fancy and include something like Spirited Away for auto-hiding applications you aren't using, but that's not the point here (and I don't think that app works in Leopard). I am assuming you're settling in to "just write." I find the default gray works fine, but you can customize the color and make it black if you are ready to zone out on your text.

Next, fire up TextEdit. While you can zoom the TextEdit window, I find the wide view of your text is distracting. WriteRoom is nice because you have big margins on a wider screen, making it easier to read what you write. To simulate this, just resize your text edit window to mimic a page of paper in front of you. Go to Preferences in TextEdit and alter the default font settings (for rich or plain text, depending on what you prefer). You can also change the default window size, or text area. I found a height of 45 with rulers turned off went from the top of the screen to the bottom on my 15" MacBook Pro. I use 18-pt Helvetica, but if you prefer Marker Felt, go for it.

That's it! You can't customize TextEdit as much as you can Terminal, but if you want a universal text tool that can serve as a distraction-free environment, this works in a pinch. You could just as easily pare down your browser view and pop Google or Zoho Docs over Backdrop -- or for collaborative editing, open a free Etherpad page. If you do a lot of writing, you may want to look into WriteRoom. There's also an iPhone app for WriteRoom, which includes a mechanism for editing docs on your Mac (sort of).

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 in the menu bar > Services > Summarize.

Once you're in the summarize service, you can quickly and easily shorten the selected text by moving the slider between 1% and 100%. As you move it, the text will magically get shorter, while at the same time keeping the basic meaning of the text that you originally selected. The service is so accurate that it's sometimes scary.

When you're done, you can save your summarized text by closing out the window -- you will be asked to save or discard. The result is a .rtf file.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section today!

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 day, I still had this text file open, I never remembered to save what was in there, and it just wasn't as elegant a solution as I wanted. Wasn't there anything I could keep open as a memopad, that was smart enough to save itself and slide out of the way when I didn't need it?

A friend recommended Sidenote, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for -- like the Quicksilver Shelf (which I'm using religiously nowadays) it sits in drawer on the side of your desktop, can be pulled open momentarily (either with the mouse or a hotkey) and then slides right back out of view when you're done. Just like TextEdit, it allows for a nice variety of text formatting, and unlike TextEdit, it saves in a repository rather than a file. I only use one note so far, but there's functionality for multiple notes in there as well.

We last mentioned Sidenote way back in 2005, and since then it's been upgraded to 1.7.3, and streamlined a few already streamlined features. Very nice and easy app -- for the purpose, it was exactly what I needed. It's available as donationware from developer Pierre Chatel.

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 need to check out, for example, line 572.

Enter Leopard. A new standard option in TextEdit allows you to select by line using the same Command-L, I've been using for years. You don't have to use the mouse. Type Command-L, the line number, and and press return.

Sure, the error message for a bad line number is geeky ("Out of bounds line specification") but who cares? Line jump! Joy!

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 that John Appleseed (who is that guy? I'm getting a John Galt vibe from him) penned to Kate. You might recognize the text from those iconic ads of Apple's yesteryear.

Yesterday I took a little trip down to my local Apple Store (the Michigan Ave. store here in Chicago) to check out the Keyboard. That's what Apple is calling their latest engineering marvel-- not the iBoard or the MacBoard, just Keyboard. I got a chance to check out the new iMac, and play with the new iLife apps for a bit, then I cracked open TextEdit and started typing.

So what did I think? I wasn't kidding when I called it an engineering marvel-- the Keyboard is unlike any other keyboard I've seen. It is extremely, almost dangerously thin-- Apple is already making stuff the width of cardboard, and pretty soon they'll move on to paper-thin. It's not actually flexible, but I got the feeling that if I really tried (or just landed a heavy phonebook on it), I could break it in two. Probably not true, but I still felt that way.

But you don't buy a keyboard for its durability-- you buy it to type on, and that's where I ran into problems.

Ever try to open a man page in TextEdit using man | open -f? You end up with the kind of unreadable repeated characters shown here. This all dates back to the days of dot matrix and daisy wheel printing when the only way you could produce bold type was to repeatedly print characters. Fortunately, there's an easy way to convert man pages into simple, non-redundant text. Use the command-line utility col with the -b flag enabled. For example, man col | col -b | open -f will open the col man page in TextEdit without repeated characters. The -b flag tells col to exclude all but the last character written to any column, ignoring any backspaces and repeats.

Some people balk at the idea of paying for a text editor. 'Doesn't OS X ship with a pretty good text editor called TextEdit,' they say. That is very true, but if you make your living creating text documents (whether they be code, blog posts, or content of some other kind) TextEdit just won't cut it.

Enter TUAW favorite TextMate. This program is the swiss army knife of text processing. It includes a number of features that make coding and writing a breeze. It is a complex application, and as such the learning curve can be a little steep. The Pragmatic Programmers latest effort, 'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac,' hopes to turn you into a TextMate pro. Author James Edward Gray II shows the reader the ins and outs of TextMate, and teaches you how to get the most out of this great app.

'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac' is available now. The physical book costs $29.95, the PDF version costs $20, and you can grab both for $37.45.

Over at MacOSXHints, Rob G. has posted a must-read article about possible data loss from TextEdit's Save dialog. The problem stems from TextEdit's (and Cocoa's) willingness to overwrite entire folders with text files.

This data security hole seems to occur because "bundle" style files (which are actually folders and not single files) are considered on-par with flat files in OS X. TextEdit does not seem to check to ensure that the folder being replaced is actually a bundle and not, say, your entire home directory. It's an important article to read and a bug that you need to be aware of.

In my newsreader today I saw an 'iPhoto Action Pack' from Automator World that adds a handy action for workflows involving iPhoto: "Find iPhoto Item Path". While debating whether that was TUAW-worthy, my newsreader became bombarded with more headlines like System Action Pack, TextEdit Action Pack, Preview Action Pack... until I finally decided to post a roundup to cover them all in one fell swoop. So here you go kids, a whole batch of Automator Actions that add some missing abilities to everyone's favorite (or the only?) OS automation utiliity:

• System Action Pack
• iPhoto Action Pack
• Filemaker Pro Action Pack
• TextEdit Action Pack
• QuarkXPress Action Pack
• Preview Action Pack
• Photoshop Action Pack
• InDesign Action Pack

These actions, to my knowledge, are provided free from Automated Workflows, LLC.

[UPDATE: Automator World's admin stopped by to let us know that some of these action packs are actually demos of retail versions of these products offered by Automated Workflows, LLC.]

If you're the type that spends the day staring at a display and typing code, we'd bet you'd appreciate any utility that will make the process easier. Check out AutoPairs. It's a Mac OS X preference pane that closes your brackets, braces and quotes for you. Type a left bracket, for instance, and a right bracket and left arrow appear. Pretty spiffy, especially when you consider that BBEdit doesn't do this out of the box.

Note that, since AutoPairs is a preference pane plug-in, it won't work under Rosetta, though the developer promises that a universal version is in the works. AutoPairs requires Panther or better and is free.

[Via ...on a long piece of string]

When I'm writing an e-mail or fiddling in TextEdit, I often copy in text from another location (Safari, another e-mail, etc.). Doing that, of course, copies the formatting along with it, screwing up the consistency of the document. (So, say I'm writing a 12-point Arial doc in TextEdit; I copy over some 10-point Verdana bold text from Safari, and all of a sudden I have a single doc with two different kinds of formatting -- and selecting the text and reapplying my previous settings is a time-consuming pain in the butt.)

But Apple's aware of this hassle, and cleverly placed in a Copy Formatting feature, very similar to Word's Format Painter. Simply select the text with the formatting you want to copy and hit Command-Option-C. Now highlight the text you want re-formatted and apply the changes by keying Command-Option-V. Presto-chango, any formatting settings (face, bold, size, etc.) should now apply to all the text you selected. Neato.