First off, there is a serious set of formatting controls tucked away in the menu bar, but you may need to turn it on. In the image below, I have a TextEdit document setup to be a “Plain Text” file.

The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I., a convenient ...

If you don’t write all the time, then you probably don’t need a full-featured word processor, such as Microsoft Word () or Apple Pages (). But you still may want a flexible tool for handling text that ...

Everyone writes. Whether you draft reports, make grocery lists, or author scholarly works, the tool you use for text may be the most important program on your Mac. Some people need a full-featured ...

If you keep on changing TextEdit from rich text mode to plain text each time you open the app, here's how you can change the default settings in the often-used text-editing tool. TextEdit is arguably ...

Underneath its slick interface, OS X has a number of hidden configuration files that contain the settings for default and standard behaviors. While in most cases these files being hidden is good for ...

Apple’s TextEdit program is a basic text editor included with OS X, which like WordPad for Windows can be used to quickly create text documents in plain text (.txt) or in rich text (RTF) formats.

Michael Rankin, an instructor at LinkedIn, wrote a tip last year about finding the word count in TextEdit on the Mac. It’s a helpful feature that isn’t in an obvious area like it is in Pages. I ...

Mac OS X's bare bones text editor gets some attention in the coming release of Lion, adding support for vertical layouts for East Asian languages, as well as a graphical menu bar with font selection ...

For some silly reason, OS X’s TextEdit app’s default format is rich text. If you prefer plain text, Defaults Write points out that you can easily set that as your default with a Terminal command. All ...

How to select multiple portions of text in TextEdit Here’s how you can select different pieces of text and copy them at the same time in TextEdit. This makes it much easier and faster to select ...

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 ...