Main Content

TextEdit – Possibly the Best App?

textEdit What’s the one application I probably can’t live without? Believe it or not, it’s TextEdit!

TextEdit is just a basic text program that comes pre-installed with Mac OSX. It use to be called SimpleText back in OS 9 and you may think it’s only a text application, however it’s much much more.

TextEdit can read almost any documents. Maybe not perfectly, but it comes in handy when or corrups a document. Just open it in TextEdit and you’ll probably be able to find content. It’ll also try to open just about anything! Sure, some documents may open up with a of gibberish, however most documents open up just fine.

Text edit can handle multilingual text, graphics, movies, and other document files. It includes spell check, word completion, and can even speak aloud an entire document or selected text. That’s always fun. 🙂 It can also read Word docs, create tables, lists and work with HTML. You can save documents out as plain text, rich text format (RTF), Word or Word XML format.

The limits of this little application from Apple are seemingly endless. Ok, so it can’t do everything, but it does do quite a bit more than most people realize.


3 Responses

  1. Georg says:

    I wish SimpleText would run on Mac OSX. I have lost many TextEdit files already. They just don’t open anymore. I tried to open them with Word or import them in QuarkXPress, no way, the files won’t open. They also don’t open from within the application over the menue.

    • Thomas says:

      Never heard of an issue like that. I’ve never once had a TextEdit file not open in TextEdit anymore. Maybe you should check out TextWrangler. It’s a good alternative.

Leave a Reply