- TextEdit is a free text editor that comes with Mac OSX.
- You can use it for writing code if you make certain preference settings, as you will be doing below. Without these settings TextEdit's default file type is .rtf (rich text format).
- You will be setting TextEdit to use Plain text.
- This means that TextEdit will use a limited set of characters: only 27 (128) or 28 (256) standard characters available to choose from.
- By doing this the files are small and easily opened by different operating systems.
- These plain test character sets are often referred to as ASCII or ISO/8859-1.
- If you have any problems with my instructions below, use this site's instructions.
Start the TextEdit application:
- Finder > Applications > TextEdit
In the TextEdit menu (next to the Apple menu) select:
- Preferences.
Make the following changes in Preferences:
In the New Document section:
- Select:
- Plain text
- Plain text
- Disable:
- Smart quotes
- Smart dashes
- Smart links
In the Open and Save section:
- Enable:
Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text
- Disable:
Add ".txt" extension to plain text files
Note that by doing this you will need to manually add a .html (or .css, .js, etc.) file extension when saving a file.
In the Edit menu:
- Disable (if not already disabled):
- Smart Quotes
- Smart Dashes
- Smart Links
There are no other changes required.