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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Other criticisms may be valid, but TextEdit is a terrible comparison. TextEdit is comparable to Windows WordPad (another terrible app - which is why Microsoft dropped it). Both are rich-text , not plaintext editors. They're more like Microsoft Word without the features.

Notepad is a plaintext editor, of which their is no equivalent built into Macs outside of terminal applications.

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You can change TextEdit to handle plain text: Format > Convert to plain text, or Shift + Command + T.

I prefer TextEdit over Notepad. Its undo is way better, and it's overall a snappier app.

I can do something similar with Microsoft Word as well.

But I also risk losing something in the process. Did I emphasize things with bold or italic in the editor? That will be lost when saving to plain text. In that sense Word and TextEdit are both correctly called rich text editors which just happen to have the ability to save to plain text.

Notepad, however, doesn't support the formatting... so you can't create something that you can't save. That's the difference.

I disagree. Go into the TextEdit settings (Cmd-,) and change the default format from "rich text" to "plain text". Next time you open TextEdit, all rich-text features are disabled (no formatting toolbars, no Cmd-B/Cmd-I keybindings, etc.), so the interface is to me indistinguishable from NotePad.

This is completely different from Word.

You cannot use bold or italics in plain text mode in TextEdit. It is truly a plain text mode. If you try to switch from rich text to plain text, and you utilize any rich text features in your document, it will warn you that you're going to lose that information.

You can switch TextEdit between rich text and plaintext modes.

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