TextEdit has its roots in OPENSTEP, where it was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. It even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.
coldtea 3 hours ago [-]
>a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things
Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.
It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.
steve1977 3 hours ago [-]
It's like comparing Apple Photos to Lightoom maybe.
coldtea 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. Which, for people needing some light editing and archiving, it's a useful comparison.
anthk 2 hours ago [-]
Wordpad to Word. Ted (GTK2 build, it's an RTF editor) to Libreoffice Writer.
mananaysiempre 6 hours ago [-]
> TextEdit [...] was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
Even before OPENSTEP. And you can still build TextEdit on Linux or BSD. So, it is the cross-platform option.
I ran it for years on Linux.
2b3a51 1 hours ago [-]
Would building TextEdit on Linux require the GnuStep libraries or similar? Or is it stand-alone. Web search isn't coming up with much and I'm interested.
Wonder if it can be still compiled for modern Apple Silicon MacOS given Cocoa have been pretty much removed
wpm 2 hours ago [-]
I had to change some .strings file encoding settings and set the build target to macOS 14, but other than that and a few deprecation warnings, it built just fine in Xcode 27.2 on Tahoe 26.7.2.
Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
haunter 1 hours ago [-]
> Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
Ahh my bad sorry
rafram 2 hours ago [-]
Cocoa hasn't been removed.
ch_sm 7 hours ago [-]
Pages is an underrated Word Processor. It has the lessons of 30 years of development and experimentation of WYSIWYG editors distilled and applied in a tight little package.
malshe 2 hours ago [-]
My main issue with Pages is that it doesn't allow plugins like Word does. I'm a heavy Zotero user so a lack of Zotero plugin means I can't use Pages for anything meaningful.
Cockbrand 5 hours ago [-]
The same goes for Preview.app - it's a very underrated, super powerful app for PDF editing and lots of other stuff.
tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago [-]
It does have a lot of polish. I'm just a bit sore that it no longer supports PostScript.
karel-3d 5 hours ago [-]
It arguably gets worse with every OS X iteration. I understand why they removed postscript support, but it still makes me sad.
But it can still do a lot.
frou_dh 4 hours ago [-]
My pet peeve is that every single time you click any web link in PDFs, you have to confirm via a dialog that you want to visit a link. You used to just be able to click links.
whartung 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve never seen that, I use Safari. My nit about PDFs is pages that download the PDF rather than view them within the browser.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 hours ago [-]
For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.
smallstepforman 5 hours ago [-]
The team that created Pages, before that they were GoBe Productive for BeOS, and before that Clarris, so Pages is their 3rd or 4th redesign from scratch.
phil-pickering 6 hours ago [-]
You should be able to create and use templates for TextEdit using the Stationery Pad feature which comes built-in to macOS:
Stationery Pads are one of the almost criminally underused and well-hidden features that have been around since the Mac OS (pre-OSX) days.
Another one is Cmd+H for hiding an app. People often minimize the current window to see the next app underneath, while hiding the current app is much more elegant and creates a lot less friction for restoring it later.
Which of these hidden champions did I forget?
staplung 54 minutes ago [-]
.inetloc files. Mostly commonly used for HTML links but they can also be used to create SSH logins. They're easy to create too: just type something like
ssh://soandso@whatshername.com
into virtually any app (I use TextEdit), select the text and drag it out to some Finder location. It will create the file automatically. Then just click on the file (or open it with Quicksilver, Alfred, et. al) and it will open a new Terminal window with you ssh'd to the host as that user (normal auth procedures apply).
I don't use them too much anymore because there doesn't seem to be any way to get iTerm2 to be the default app to open such files (on modern MacOS versions the application drop-down in the Finder info window is greyed out) and I don't SSH into as many machines as I once did.
EDIT: turns out you can get iTerm2 to be the default opener for ssh .inetloc files; it's just done inside iTerm itself.
Nice! I also remember Text Clippings, although I haven't used those in ages.
jpease 3 hours ago [-]
I’d never seen that. Thank you for sharing!
gampleman 7 hours ago [-]
Also Pages also has a fairly decent print design mode. Sure, it can't compete with something like Indesign in feature parity, but I find it pretty useful to do posters, booklets, flyers and the like. It's free and fairly intuitive to use.
hbn 23 minutes ago [-]
Apple's office suite is quite nice but I fear they're devaluing it with all their Creator Studio upsells embedded in the UI over the past few years. It seems like a lot of Apple is headed in that direction and it worries me.
tptacek 10 minutes ago [-]
Real heads know that Notes.app is the sleeper Apple text editing app.
MysteryTramp 50 minutes ago [-]
I wish Apple would make TextEdit for iPad. I really want an rtf editor for iPad that doesn’t suck. I know I’m supposed to use markdown, but I like to write in rtf.
jan_m_savage 4 hours ago [-]
" A note for someone who’s coming over to water my plants while I’m out of town shouldn’t look like an analysis of a mobile crane tipover accident. "
Love this. Humor.
Synaesthesia 2 hours ago [-]
Pages is lovely, I like how intuitive it is to use (Numbers too)
Truly a lot more user friendly than Microsoft Office.
josephwegner 5 hours ago [-]
I’ve been a TextEdit-only user for years. I write notes as quick streams of consciousness for me to pick up later. TextEdit is great, but I have similar qualms as the author, and I also have been wanting something that allowed me to build some programmatic tooling around the short notes I write (ie: format these and move them to my Todo list). I’ve been working on a very simple app that is rock solid like TextEdit, but with some niceties for using it as a notes app, instead of a rich text editor.
>Honestly, who needs buttons for bold and italic? Or left, center, and right justification?
Almost every layman user? - at least for the latter, as there are well known shortcuts for the former many know.
>An advantage of TextEdit that Allison points out and which I concede: TextEdit uses much less memory than Pages. I wish that weren’t the case, but I have a 48 GB MacBook Pro, so I can afford to be profligate with RAM.
You can't be profligate with the TextEdit vs Pages level RAM use on a fucking 48GB laptop? I can be way more profligate (sic) even on 16GB or 8GB laptops.
Oh, and his other issue is you can't hide TextEdit's menubar and it takes space from the document. That for one of the more streamlined, and to the point, menubars in the history of GUI software...
I'm all for a good app review or even a good app putdown, but these guy's pet peeves, which he blows up into major issues when he's picking one or the other app are really bizarre.
MBCook 53 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I generally like Dr. Drang’s writing but the formatting buttons seemed like a really odd complaint to me too.
It’s so useful to have ultra-common stuff right at hand. I use keyboard shortcuts for some but don’t know them for others. I agree it’s a godsend for inexperienced users.
One of my top complaints about the ribbon or the sidebar stuff in pages is how hard it is to find that stuff.
And sure MacWrite didn’t show it, but it was on a 512x342 pixel screen. Adding a toolbar would take away very very precious vertical space. We can afford it now, the trade-off is different.
The article is about his personal preference, so it may not fit him well. But as a general criticism it seems very odd.
Danox 1 hours ago [-]
The review can’t be that bad. I signed up for text edit and bought it.
MBCook 58 minutes ago [-]
Bought it? It’s included in MacOS.
4 hours ago [-]
Upvoter33 4 hours ago [-]
Vs emacs?
carlos-cute 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
esFran 6 hours ago [-]
Give me KDE Kate, or give me death!
delecti 3 hours ago [-]
Kate is a text editor, TextEdit and Pages are word processors. I'd also love Kate (or Notepad++) on macos, they're just kinda a non sequitur.
WillAdams 2 hours ago [-]
TextEdit is a text editor, which has had an optional WYSIWYG word processing mode added to it --- hit cmd shift t to go into text edit mode.
MBCook 52 minutes ago [-]
Which is how I use it most of the time.
It’s like notepad + wordpad in one. Great little app.
wpm 1 hours ago [-]
Kate runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS already
Rendered at 17:29:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.
Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.
It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
[1] https://www.malsmith.net/wincvt/
I ran it for years on Linux.
Carbon was removed, not Cocoa
Ahh my bad sorry
But it can still do a lot.
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac
Another one is Cmd+H for hiding an app. People often minimize the current window to see the next app underneath, while hiding the current app is much more elegant and creates a lot less friction for restoring it later.
Which of these hidden champions did I forget?
ssh://soandso@whatshername.com
into virtually any app (I use TextEdit), select the text and drag it out to some Finder location. It will create the file automatically. Then just click on the file (or open it with Quicksilver, Alfred, et. al) and it will open a new Terminal window with you ssh'd to the host as that user (normal auth procedures apply).
I don't use them too much anymore because there doesn't seem to be any way to get iTerm2 to be the default app to open such files (on modern MacOS versions the application drop-down in the Finder info window is greyed out) and I don't SSH into as many machines as I once did.
EDIT: turns out you can get iTerm2 to be the default opener for ssh .inetloc files; it's just done inside iTerm itself.
Settings > Profiles > [select profile on left] > URL Schemes
Love this. Humor.
Truly a lot more user friendly than Microsoft Office.
Feedback appreciated! https://jort.app/
Almost every layman user? - at least for the latter, as there are well known shortcuts for the former many know.
>An advantage of TextEdit that Allison points out and which I concede: TextEdit uses much less memory than Pages. I wish that weren’t the case, but I have a 48 GB MacBook Pro, so I can afford to be profligate with RAM.
You can't be profligate with the TextEdit vs Pages level RAM use on a fucking 48GB laptop? I can be way more profligate (sic) even on 16GB or 8GB laptops.
Oh, and his other issue is you can't hide TextEdit's menubar and it takes space from the document. That for one of the more streamlined, and to the point, menubars in the history of GUI software...
I'm all for a good app review or even a good app putdown, but these guy's pet peeves, which he blows up into major issues when he's picking one or the other app are really bizarre.
It’s so useful to have ultra-common stuff right at hand. I use keyboard shortcuts for some but don’t know them for others. I agree it’s a godsend for inexperienced users.
One of my top complaints about the ribbon or the sidebar stuff in pages is how hard it is to find that stuff.
And sure MacWrite didn’t show it, but it was on a 512x342 pixel screen. Adding a toolbar would take away very very precious vertical space. We can afford it now, the trade-off is different.
The article is about his personal preference, so it may not fit him well. But as a general criticism it seems very odd.
It’s like notepad + wordpad in one. Great little app.