TextEdit vs. Pages | Hacker News Reader

TextEdit vs. Pages

leancrew.com

102 pointssurprisetalk73 comments

TextEdit has its roots in OPENSTEP, where it was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. It even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.

So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things.

> TextEdit [...] was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.

On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].

[1] https://www.malsmith.net/wincvt/

Source code, published until OS X 10.9: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...

Wonder if it can be still compiled for modern Apple Silicon MacOS given Cocoa have been pretty much removed

Cocoa hasn't been removed.

I had to change some .strings file encoding settings and set the build target to macOS 14, but other than that and a few deprecation warnings, it built just fine in Xcode 27.2 on Tahoe 26.7.2.

Carbon was removed, not Cocoa

> Carbon was removed, not Cocoa

Ahh my bad sorry

And Chess source code is also still published: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Chess (Despite what the readme says, the code seems to be for the version shipping on Mac OS 26).

The engine that Chess.app uses is GPLv2

Yes, but the engine is running in a separate process, and communicates over a generic engine protocol, so that is no reason that would force open sourcing the GUI.

>a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much sense probably, they're really different things

Both can and are be used for writing, and for basic rich text editing, on top of the other stuff Pages can do, so it makes total sense to compare them for this purpose.

It's not like we're comparing Excel vs Lightroom.

It's like comparing Apple Photos to Lightoom maybe.

Wordpad to Word. Ted (GTK2 build, it's an RTF editor) to Libreoffice Writer.

Yes. Which, for people needing some light editing and archiving, it's a useful comparison.

Even before OPENSTEP. And you can still build TextEdit on Linux or BSD. So, it is the cross-platform option.

I ran it for years on Linux.

Would building TextEdit on Linux require the GnuStep libraries or similar? Or is it stand-alone. Web search isn't coming up with much and I'm interested.

GNUStep of course, back in the day it was part of a GNUStep application bundle.

Pages is an underrated Word Processor. It has the lessons of 30 years of development and experimentation of WYSIWYG editors distilled and applied in a tight little package.

The same goes for Preview.app - it's a very underrated, super powerful app for PDF editing and lots of other stuff.

It arguably gets worse with every OS X iteration. I understand why they removed postscript support, but it still makes me sad.

But it can still do a lot.

My pet peeve is that every single time you click any web link in PDFs, you have to confirm via a dialog that you want to visit a link. You used to just be able to click links.

I’ve never seen that, I use Safari. My nit about PDFs is pages that download the PDF rather than view them within the browser.

For me, it's about 30% of my pdfs just showing blank/white pages... when I drag them to a Firefox tab, they render perfectly. It's Preview, not the pdf that's the problem.

It's been screwed up since Lion I think, if that was the one where they played with the idea of "people don't have to save anymore", still decent but has some dumb bits of friction in the main flows from the mistakes of that idea.

The iOS version is straight up trash though if you're trying to work with multiple PDFs like bank statements on iOS.

It does have a lot of polish. I'm just a bit sore that it no longer supports PostScript.

All the original apps / utilities in old OSX were surprisingly powerful given their simple interfaces. Network Utility, Image Capture, etc just did the things. I remember pointing out to my father (on his first Mac) that we were eschewing HP's drivers and using what Apple built right into the OS. I don't think it had the impact on him that it had on me.

Love using it to make white bits transparent. The tool also exists in Keynote but is more powerful in Preview. It's the second tool from the left in the editing toolbar.

The team that created Pages, before that they were GoBe Productive for BeOS, and before that Clarris, so Pages is their 3rd or 4th redesign from scratch.

My main issue with Pages is that it doesn't allow plugins like Word does. I'm a heavy Zotero user so a lack of Zotero plugin means I can't use Pages for anything meaningful.

There is an Endnote plugin. Google tells me it is developed by Apple, so the plug-in interface isn’t published, and it also may be limited to that single use case, but that’s a (probably tiny) lead towards writing one.

I am aware of Endnote plugin but my entire library is on Zotero. I have close to 20K papers there as of today and it's constantly expanding, so I can't move to Endnote. Besides that I am a lifelong supporter of Zotero.

Let me rephrase that: Pages has a door that allows an EndNote plugin to do things inside Pages. That door may be locked and it may not lead to (all) the stuff you want, but if you’re looking for a door, I would start there. Maybe, it is open or can be pried open.

Also Pages also has a fairly decent print design mode. Sure, it can't compete with something like Indesign in feature parity, but I find it pretty useful to do posters, booklets, flyers and the like. It's free and fairly intuitive to use.

I’ve been a TextEdit-only user for years. I write notes as quick streams of consciousness for me to pick up later. TextEdit is great, but I have similar qualms as the author, and I also have been wanting something that allowed me to build some programmatic tooling around the short notes I write (ie: format these and move them to my Todo list). I’ve been working on a very simple app that is rock solid like TextEdit, but with some niceties for using it as a notes app, instead of a rich text editor.

Feedback appreciated! https://jort.app/

I like the look of Jort. It almost makes me wish I still used a Mac.

You should be able to create and use templates for TextEdit using the Stationery Pad feature which comes built-in to macOS:

https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac

Stationery Pads are one of the almost criminally underused and well-hidden features that have been around since the Mac OS (pre-OSX) days.

Another one is Cmd+H for hiding an app. People often minimize the current window to see the next app underneath, while hiding the current app is much more elegant and creates a lot less friction for restoring it later.

Which of these hidden champions did I forget?

.inetloc files. Mostly commonly used for HTML links but they can also be used to create SSH logins. They're easy to create too: just type something like

ssh://soandso@whatshername.com

into virtually any app (I use TextEdit), select the text and drag it out to some Finder location. It will create the file automatically. Then just click on the file (or open it with Quicksilver, Alfred, et. al) and it will open a new Terminal window with you ssh'd to the host as that user (normal auth procedures apply).

I don't use them too much anymore because there doesn't seem to be any way to get iTerm2 to be the default app to open such files (on modern MacOS versions the application drop-down in the Finder info window is greyed out) and I don't SSH into as many machines as I once did.

EDIT: turns out you can get iTerm2 to be the default opener for ssh .inetloc files; it's just done inside iTerm itself.

Settings > Profiles > [select profile on left] > URL Schemes

Nice! I also remember Text Clippings, although I haven't used those in ages.

I’d never seen that. Thank you for sharing!

Back when Apple put in cloud in TextEdit I had to stop using it because it was too many steps to start writing, you had to choose a file path and name before you could start typing. I've always used it to quickly jot down something, never because it had rich text or so. So I had to write my own simple and fast alternative: https://git.jeena.net/jeena/TextEd.app (that was 13 years ago, meanwhile I gave up on Apple).

Yesterday I got a email from someone telling me they ported TextEd from Objective-C to Swift so they brought it back to life https://github.com/jrcii/texted

I had the same problem! Disabling iCloud for TextEdit solved that issue.

Command-N in TextEdit creates a new file called Untitled in your iCloud Drive’s TextEdit folder. No upfront name choice required.

So you switched to Windows?

After more than a decade of successfully avoiding TextEdit (and seeing it only once in every months by mistake when some rtf file click would open it) I finally changed the format to Plain Text, a few months ago, and it is now consistently beating CotEditor in usage. I honestly never even thought I could use this app in plain text mode. SubEthaEdit would have been still my favourite but it's abandoned now.

Apple's office suite is quite nice but I fear they're devaluing it with all their Creator Studio upsells embedded in the UI over the past few years. It seems like a lot of Apple is headed in that direction and it worries me.

Real heads know that Notes.app is the sleeper Apple text editing app.

I just really wish it had even the most basic revision control. It's really easy to accidentally wipe out an entire note on your iPhone and then iCloud helpfully syncs it everywhere. Or even the ability to simply make a note read-only would be nice.

1) icloud recovery 2) you can lock notes (at least in ios 26)

Neither of these work. iCloud Recovery lets you restore deleted notes (if you're lucky), but not get back a note where you've accidentally deleted the text. Getting back a deleted note is easy; you can already do that from "Recently Deleted" for up to 30 days. But undoing a stray edit, you'd better do it right away.

e.g. you're trying to copy text out of a note so you select a portion of it. One stray tap and the highlighted text is gone. Shake to undo immediately or the text is long gone and then it syncs everywhere. The maneuver is so risky I've taught myself a work-around when I'm on my iPhone when I only need a portion of a note. I use the share icon to copy the entire note, paste that into a new temporary note, edit the new note down to the portion I want to share, then copy that text and finally delete the temporary note.

Locking a note doesn't do what you think it does. It doesn't prevent edits. It just means you need to provide a password to view the note. Once you've unlocked the note, it's just as susceptible to a stray edit.

On macOS you can really lock files, preventing them from being edited:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/lock-a-document-on-...

It was silly of Apple to use the term "lock" to mean different things. They should've called the thing in the Notes app "private" or "hide" or something. Also, locked notes don't have the same functionality as non-locked notes; e.g. you can't add attachments to a locked note:

https://support.apple.com/guide/notes/lock-your-notes-not28c...

Anyway, the best you can do if you accidentally edited a note and didn't undo it in time is to extract the note from a backup of the Notes sqlite DB, should you have one from your Mac (say).

I wish Apple would make TextEdit for iPad. I really want an rtf editor for iPad that doesn’t suck. I know I’m supposed to use markdown, but I like to write in rtf.

" A note for someone who’s coming over to water my plants while I’m out of town shouldn’t look like an analysis of a mobile crane tipover accident. "

Love this. Humor.

Pages is lovely, I like how intuitive it is to use (Numbers too)

Truly a lot more user friendly than Microsoft Office.

Dr. Drang's blog has been in my RSS feeds for around 8-10 years. While the author postulates about math or physics that I can't understand, I love the software parts (some of which I can't understand literally, but understand theoretically).

I was a hardcore user of TextEdit (text only mode) until SublimeText and vim replaced it. I never would have thought to need to hide the toolbar because I always loaded it as a plaintext editor and I had to go look for a way to hide it in RTF mode to verify that Drang was right about not being able to hide it. Confirmed, can't find a way to hide it. Didn't bother me before I was a plaintext person.

After changing default format to plain text, textedit was great for me until i lost some work due to unexpected froze and crash multiple times. Since then i use vscode for simple stuff but it's definitely not my favorite.

I use TextEdit a lot for drafting fiction. I only use it in plaintext mode, and enable word wrap with ⌘ + W.

To me there is noticeable input lag when using Obsidian or IA Writer that just doesn't exist in TextEdit.app. I also could use Nvim, which I use for coding, but often don't care enough about editing while I'm drafting.

> I really thought TextEdit would have a setting for hiding the toolbar, but I haven’t found one.

It used to. It became always-on in one of the big cat releases, I forget which one. I too wish it had this option, but given that it's about the only thing I'd change in TextEdit, I can live with it.

>Honestly, who needs buttons for bold and italic? Or left, center, and right justification?

Almost every layman user? - at least for the latter, as there are well known shortcuts for the former many know.

>An advantage of TextEdit that Allison points out and which I concede: TextEdit uses much less memory than Pages. I wish that weren’t the case, but I have a 48 GB MacBook Pro, so I can afford to be profligate with RAM.

You can't be profligate with the TextEdit vs Pages level RAM use on a fucking 48GB laptop? I can be way more profligate (sic) even on 16GB or 8GB laptops.

Oh, and his other issue is you can't hide TextEdit's menubar and it takes space from the document. That for one of the more streamlined, and to the point, menubars in the history of GUI software...

I'm all for a good app review or even a good app putdown, but these guy's pet peeves, which he blows up into major issues when he's picking one or the other app are really bizarre.

The review can’t be that bad. I signed up for text edit and bought it.

Bought it? It’s included in MacOS.

GP probably refers to the Pro Plus subscription instead.

Yeah I generally like Dr. Drang’s writing but the formatting buttons seemed like a really odd complaint to me too.

It’s so useful to have ultra-common stuff right at hand. I use keyboard shortcuts for some but don’t know them for others. I agree it’s a godsend for inexperienced users.

One of my top complaints about the ribbon or the sidebar stuff in pages is how hard it is to find that stuff.

And sure MacWrite didn’t show it, but it was on a 512x342 pixel screen. Adding a toolbar would take away very very precious vertical space. We can afford it now, the trade-off is different.

The article is about his personal preference, so it may not fit him well. But as a general criticism it seems very odd.

>Now it’s true that Pages has a toolbar, but it’s tucked up in the title bar where it doesn’t take away space from the document.

Ok, number one the TextEdit bar is like 5 pixels taller so maybe being a little melodramatic here.

But straight up, it's flat out wrong to say "the Pages tool bar doesn't take space away from the document" because if those buttons weren't smashed into the title bar, the title bar would only need to be as tall as the title bar in Text Edit. It's still stealing precious vertical pixels from you, possibly even 5!

ClarisWorks from the 90s was the best

So was WordPerfect, the grand-daddy of word processors. I, for one, prefer VCS for my daily text-related needs. Were it not for VSC I'd most likely resort to using iA Writer full-time.

Vs emacs?

Yup. Why change editors when you change OS?

Give me KDE Kate, or give me death!

Kate is a text editor, TextEdit and Pages are word processors. I'd also love Kate (or Notepad++) on macos, they're just kinda a non sequitur.

TextEdit is a text editor, which has had an optional WYSIWYG word processing mode added to it --- hit cmd shift t to go into text edit mode.

Which is how I use it most of the time.

It’s like notepad + wordpad in one. Great little app.

> hit cmd shift t to go into text edit mode

Well, I guess I should have actually explored the menu, but I've been using macOS since 2005 and did not know this.

I've just been using CotEditor or Visual Studio Code (and Sublime Text in the past) whenever I need a plaintext editor.

Kate runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS already

Reply on news.ycombinator.com