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 prefer TextEdit over Notepad. Its undo is way better, and it's overall a snappier app.
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.
This is completely different from Word.