> many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit

macOS also comes with vim btw.

Open terminal and then run vim from there.

Or use ed. macOS has ed also. And as we know, ed is the standard text editor.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..

I do this so religiously that when I'm setting up a new system I am always surprised that rich text is the default.

TextEdit is pretty great.

Assuming it was disk corruption, as seems likely, it's not immediately obvious to me why plain text would have been any better?

Probably Disk Corruption, my wife's 2008 Macbook has RTF files that still open, even on newer macs (after copying them), on Linux and Windows.

It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.

Like how computers went straight for windowed GUIs even during the early era of limited resources before the fullscreen-only UI that the iPad brought.

Note that TextEdit will put curly quotes in your document if you let it

> My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.

It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.

Tbf it’s kinda on apple that this isn’t obvious, I’ve used Mac’s for 20 years and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But not a big deal of course.

After using SubEthaEdit, BB and what not for almost 9 years on mac now I finally thought one day that there might be N option in Text Edit to make it plaintext and there it was. Now I just use it. One of the most icky mac moments have been whenever a text file opened in textedit in its default behaviour and then I had to change “opens with” for that file.

Try opening them in Libreoffice, it's often able to open crusy old documents.

Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).

Also, don't sleep on the tragically underappreciated Pages.

When I heard they rewrote Notepad in JavaScript I knew we had entered the End Times...

Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.

A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).

They put it in Paint, too. That's when I rediscovered Irfanview.

Apple has added it to textedit too with their equivalent intelligence enabled. You're throwing shade in the wrong direction.

Coteditor is cool, but it's not TextMate though :(

This may be my most used software. It’s indispensable.

> It also likes to save to iCloud by default if you're signed in.

Like any (most) actual native macOS applications.

TextKit 2 is a disappointment tbh

I hope they’ll do a TextKit 3 that will use modern design patterns…

(It 's TextMate. RIP)

This is a case of "everything old is new again".

A lot of this is new to the open source world. Proprietary systems have had this for decades. In a lot of ways, the stuff we use for things like javascript are a huge step downwards from the tooling available for Java, C#, and Visual Basic.

Visual Studio is an absolutely incredible piece of software. Two decades ago, you could drag and drop GUIs. You could write callback functions on buttons and never see the any of the code around that. You could write entire programs this way.

Vibe coding has existed since visual basic for applications escaped from the deep dark depths were it was wrought. If we want to go back further, look at fourth generation languages–the unholy realm where SQL came from. ;)

What we are seeing is wider adoption of old ideas. That wider adoption may be sufficient to cause a new era of engineering.

Rmate is really nice to open remote files locally in Textmate.

>Now you can't get rid of the formatting bar - the one with the typeface, size, bold/italics/underline

Patches welcome! (Textedit is open source, should not be too hard to ask your favorite LLM to add a menu option to toggle the visibility of the format bar)

Just tried: open TextEdit, new document (creates an empty document). Close it, no save dialog.

Happens for me too. I assume it's an iCloud thing (I vaguely remember the behaviour changing around the time I set up iCloud years ago), but I haven't ever bothered trying to figure out a way to turn it off...

I don't know. I use it to write my resume in rtf and then everything else I need in plain text.

Mostly I use apple notes, though.

Fwiw the last open source release was for 10.9, good for my purposes but probably older than what most would want.

Vim is far from simple no matter how you put it. It is tens of MB, plenty of features and a steep learning curve.

I think a better fit would be nano. Smaller and easier to use than vim.

Now, even nano is not that small, if you want small and you like vim, you have vi (not vim), like the version included in Busybox.

I grew to like vi after thousands of unpleasant exposures, but I'd like to see the day the New Yorker writes about vim at all, nevermind about how simple it is to use

IDK vim and emacs are probably not for everyone, they are like the "higher math" of editing...

This x100. While I do use AI in (Neo)vim it's not built in and you can take it or leave it. And even when you do choose to use it it's on an as-needed/wanted basis.

The app that you’re supposed to use for persistent, unnamed, always open documents is obviously Stickies. Try it out by using cmd+shift+Y in any application to add selected text to a new sticky.

(I’m kidding, I’ve never intentionally used this macOS feature.)

There’s nothing about AI in the title, so if they’re trying to get clicks based on that, they’re probably failing.

this is a pretty reasonable fairly non-technical reduction for the average New Yorker reader.

Code editors are overkill, and can be annoying, for those who are just looking to write a bit of text and don't want the app to try and highlight it based on an assumed syntax, start indenting things, or whatever else it will try and do.

I used Sublime for many years, and currently use VS Code for work reasons. I still open TextEdit or Stickies all the time when I just need to note some text down and I don't want it in a random tab in my project. Sometimes I will use VS Code, if I need the tools if offers to do something to the text. It's all about picking the right tool for the job.

Preview.app? I consider it to be the best app by Apple and haven't found anything that is on its level. But it does lack being able to do Acrobat (proprietary) signatures. Everything else in this space is a joke.

You just named three code editors. TextEdit is not a code editor. Not everyone is a developer.

The iWork apps are all brilliant.

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.

Spent a bit of time thinking there must be one app by Apple but doesn’t seem like it.