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Comment by steve1977 | Hacker News Reader

steve1977

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.

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> 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/

>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.

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.

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.

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