Text viewing and Editing with TextEdit

TextEdit is a very simple text editor that comes with every Mac OS X system. It is an application that can be found in the Applications folder. This application can open a variety of formats including Microsoft Word documents. In the previous article, we talked about the application Preview and how it can be used to view and edit images. Like Preview, TextEdit is also a program that comes with the OS but it is for text documents- not images. By default, it will render HTML files so that you can view webpages with it. In order to view the raw source code, you must change the preferences. First, open the application by double clicking its icon which is located in the Applications folder.

When in TextEdit, go to the “TextEdit” menu up top and select “Preferences”. Incidentally, every application has a “Preference” menu item under its own application menu. If you were in Word, the application menu would be “Word” and you can modify its preferences in the same way. This is similar to “Properties” in a Windows environment. Preferences alter the way a program behaves and can be set individually for each user on a Mac OS X system. In this case, we want to alter the way TextEdit opens HTML documents. But remember, you can apply this same technique to EVERY single Mac application to customize each application’s behavior on a per user basis.

IMPORTANT: Since this changes the behavior of the application, you must QUIT the application and then restart it for the changes to take effect!