Tested on macOS 10.13

Edit text with TextEdit.app

Usually I type my words into vi, but today I’m composing this page in TextEdit.app.

TextEdit.app is pre-installed on every Mac and supports plain text. To start using it for plain text files, set these defaults.

First, open TextEdit.app,
press ⌘, to open Preferences,
switch Format to Plain text.

Note: You can also adjust the default font and size by clicking on Change beside Plain text font.

TextEdit.app > Plain text

You can always adjust the font size in the current window with ⌘+ and ⌘-.

Optionally, go to Preferences > Open and Save. Check When Opening a File to Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text.

TextEdit.app > HTML as code

Now you can close the TextEdit window and open a new one in plain text.

You can write some prose in TextEdit, but editing long texts, especially across multiple files, is inefficient. Frankly, I switched to Vim to edit this page as soon as the first draft was complete.

Plain text is awesome!