The bare-bones Mac writing app represents a literalist sensibility that is coming back into vogue as A.I. destabilizes our technological interactions.
The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I., a convenient series of visual metaphors that allows us to interact more easily with our machines. The most basic computing interface is the command-line prompt, the empty box in which users write instructions in code directly to the machine; the Xerox Star replaced that forbidding vacuum with a friendly illustration of a tabletop surface, textured in patterned pixels, scattered with icons for folders, spreadsheets, and filing trays. A 1982 paper on the device described the then novel system: “Users are encouraged to think of the objects on the Desktop in physical terms. You can move the icons around to arrange your Desktop as you wish. (Messy Desktops are certainly possible, just as in real life.)” That mess derives from the files that we scatter on our desktops, agglomerations of data in formats that read as increasingly arcane and anachronistic: PDFs, JPGs, ZIPs, M4As. Similar to a physical desk drawer, the desktop is now something that we tend to stuff full and then forget about.
Over the past decade of computing, the desktop has receded. Digital-file systems have gone the way of the IRL inbox tray. Instead, we use the search bar to call up any file that we might want to find or tap apps that provide self-contained, streamlined experiences for consuming or producing content. Our phone home screens are even less customizable and less idiosyncratic than our computer desktops; we rarely think of individual files existing on our phones. Apple recently launched an iPhone operating-system interface redesign called Liquid Glass that turns its icons translucent, further homogenizing their appearance. Even such icons may soon be a thing of the past. The promise of artificial intelligence is that the desktop will disappear entirely and users will only interact with a chatbot or a voice that will carry out their bidding through plain language alone, morphing the entire computer into an anthropomorphized character. No mess there, just A.I. efficiency.
Amid the accelerating automation of our computers—and the proliferation of assistants and companions and agents designed to execute tasks for us—I’ve been thinking more about the desktop that’s hidden in the background of the laptop I use every day. Mine is strewn with screenshots and Word documents and e-books. What I’ve accrued the most of by far, though, are TextEdit files, from the bare-bones Mac app that just lets you type stuff into a blank window. Apple computers have come with text-editing software since the original Mac was released, in 1984; the current iteration of the program launched in the mid-nineties and has survived relatively unchanged. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself relying on TextEdit more as every other app has grown more complicated, adding cloud uploads, collaborative editing, and now generative A.I. TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling. Those files are stored as RTFs (short for rich-text format), one step up from the most basic TXT file. TextEdit now functions as my to-do-list app, my e-mail drafting window, my personal calendar, and my stash of notes to self, which act like digital Post-its.
I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does. I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen. I could make lists on actual paper, of course, but I’ve also found that my brain has been so irredeemably warped by keyboards that I can only really get my thoughts down by typing. (Apparently my internal monologue takes place in Arial typeface, fourteen-point font.)
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Comments
By al_borland 2025-10-2420:4411 reply For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.
Or if you want that as your default:Format -> Make Plain Text
I’ve seen many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit. So I spread this information every time I have the excuse.TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> Plain TextPlus, plain text will likely outlive RTF. My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
By QuantumNomad_ 2025-10-2420:515 reply > many people giving presentations claim that Apple doesn’t ship and plain text editor and tell people to download one to make a basic edit
macOS also comes with vim btw.
Open terminal and then run vim from there.
Or use ed. macOS has ed also. And as we know, ed is the standard text editor.
And for a few years now (since ‘real’ emacs was removed, I think) ‘mg’, which is a terminal-based eMacs-alike.
By zie 2025-10-253:29 Ya, they pretty much eradicated everything GPL to avoid any viral licensing problems.
By mfro 2025-10-2421:19 Pico is also still included (and aliased to nano, funnily)
I think I’d also point out that an operating system including or not including a specific piece of software is just not a big deal. The whole point of the operating system is to provide a framework to install other applications.
The iPad didn’t include a calculator for, what, over a decade? And it didn’t really matter.
> The iPad didn’t include a calculator for, what, over a decade? And it didn’t really matter.
It made for a lot of ad-powered free calculator apps. I think that part wasn't particularly good for users.
By jama211 2025-10-257:05 Yes in practice people used either an ad based free calculator app, a web based calculator, their phone, etc. I maintain this isn’t a big deal. Annoying and I’m glad they fixed it, but not a big deal. Or, just pay like $1 or something for a proper app.
I bought PCalc anyway, it’s better than the standard app.
By jshier 2025-10-2421:30 nano is now an alias for UW pico, since Apple won't take any new versions of GPL tools.
By schmidtleonard 2025-10-2421:211 reply ed is old, but osx bash is ancient
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2423:371 reply I'm sort of surprised they didn't just build a bash compatible shell.
By Wowfunhappy 2025-10-250:091 reply Well, they switched the default shell to zsh.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-258:51 That's fair, I use macOS but I wasn't sure if I installed zsh or if it was what it came with, since I also use it on my Linux installs.
By xyzzy_plugh 2025-10-2420:582 reply I do this so religiously that when I'm setting up a new system I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
TextEdit is pretty great.
> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.
Peep the NeXT 0.9 release notes: https://vtda.org/docs/computing/NeXT/NeXT%200.9-1.0%20Releas...
“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”
And the NeXTSTEP 3.0 programming book which goes on and on and on about the `Text` object and how good their RTF support is: https://simson.net/ref/1993/NeXTSTEP3.0.pdf#G16.44605
† https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...
By sillywalk 2025-10-254:55 This vaguely reminds me of Styledit, the included text editor from BeOS / Haiku.
It supports basic text formatting - alignment, different fonts/sizes/colours - but these are stored as extended attributes in the file, while the "actual file" remains plain text.
By hyperjeff 2025-10-2718:42 Early releases of the dev tools even included the TextEdit source for you to learn from.
By daveidol 2025-10-253:46 Same
I would think you should reasonably be able to open those files with a regular text editor (vim comes to mind) and manually extract the contents .. right? I guess if there was disk corruption and that produced an invalid UTF8 stream then maybe not .. but that'd at least be a smoking gun pointing to corruption, versus nobody being able to read the files anymore..
By mananaysiempre 2025-10-2423:441 reply If you use a non-Latin alphabet, Microsoft Word’s RTF output is a horrific mess of encoding switches everywhere that makes manual text extraction pretty much untenable (and while RTF can use both UCS-2 and Windows codepages, Word seems to stick to—potentially multiple—codepages if it can, presumably for compatibility). That said, Microsoft always intended RTF to be Word’s exchange and archival format (unlike DOC, which was a mess they did not want to document), so it has enough of an official spec that extracting text, at least, is very possible.
By torstenvl 2025-10-254:54 RTF uses UTF-16, not UCS-2; you can in fact use two \u____ commands in a row using surrogate pairs.
Anyway, I wonder if this would work for you.
By Wowfunhappy 2025-10-2420:521 reply Assuming it was disk corruption, as seems likely, it's not immediately obvious to me why plain text would have been any better?
By al_borland 2025-10-2421:001 reply Plain text wouldn't be better in that case, but then I'd know it was corruption instead of questioning if there was a spec change and trying to find a compatible piece of software that would still open it.
RTF is a textual format. You can open it in a plain text editor to see whether it's completely trashed or not. If it isn't, then you can even recover the raw text from it without too much difficulty.
By al_borland 2025-10-2421:18 In that case, it was corrupt. I did try opening it in a plain text editor. Some of the file was there, but not the whole thing.
By Razengan 2025-10-2423:50 It feels anachronistic how something simple like Markdown wasn't an standard rich text formatting er format before the various opaque ones that caught on.
Like how computers went straight for windowed GUIs even during the early era of limited resources before the fullscreen-only UI that the iPad brought.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-2423:351 reply Probably Disk Corruption, my wife's 2008 Macbook has RTF files that still open, even on newer macs (after copying them), on Linux and Windows.
By giancarlostoro 2025-10-258:52 Forgot to add, you may want to buy a $50 SSD drive copy your old one over, and save all your files. It brings new life to old macs to get an SSD, alternatively if you're not going to power it on very often, just buy an old HDD. Old Macs are easy to maintenance the hardware. They are literal thanks, I'm not sure why that is, maybe its another sign of all the Windows bloat. Any time I install Linux on a Windows laptop, it feels like it adds 20 years of life to it. I still have a laptop I bought when Windows 8 came out, it still runs Linux just fine to this day.
By thaumasiotes 2025-10-254:13 > My RTF files from high school are trash now. I don’t know if it was from disk corruption or changes over the last 25 years, but they’ve been lost to time.
It's a simple format. Put them in a hex editor and you should be able to extract the text.
Note that TextEdit will put curly quotes in your document if you let it
By altairprime 2025-10-2514:54 Curly quotes are plaintext, same as any other character.
By jama211 2025-10-257:06 Tbf it’s kinda on apple that this isn’t obvious, I’ve used Mac’s for 20 years and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But not a big deal of course.
By crossroadsguy 2025-10-251:31 After using SubEthaEdit, BB and what not for almost 9 years on mac now I finally thought one day that there might be N option in Text Edit to make it plaintext and there it was. Now I just use it. One of the most icky mac moments have been whenever a text file opened in textedit in its default behaviour and then I had to change “opens with” for that file.
Try opening them in Libreoffice, it's often able to open crusy old documents.
By al_borland 2025-10-2420:59 I think I tried that. I'm not sure if I still have them, I'll have to go look, but I tried every app I could think of. I spent a few hours on it last time I looked. There was a paragraph here or there that would show up, with a bunch of garbage around it for the rest of the file.
Everyone making recommendations for other apps is missing the fact that the article is aimed at non-techies who aren't going to fire up a terminal or go searching for a plain-text, non-stylized text editor. TextEdit can save as plain text as other posters note, but most non-techies want a word processor where they can change fonts and font styles.
While I do like TextEdit, I prefer Bean (https://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html), which has been my quick word processor of choice on the Mac since the Tiger days.
By jama211 2025-10-257:08 Well said, and anyone who cares enough about text editing enough to notice is the kind of user capable of finding one (and probably having opinions on their favourite one, so apple couldn’t please everyone with a text editor anyway).
By vlark 2025-10-2422:42 Fair, but Pages tries to hard to be a Word replacement. And I think it calls home to the Apple mothership quite often, too.
Oh, for the good old days of AppleWorks!
I figured something like this didn't need to be stated but then Microsoft added Copilot to Notepad
No this is not a joke. Notepad has a giant always-present Copilot button now
By andai 2025-10-250:02 When I heard they rewrote Notepad in JavaScript I knew we had entered the End Times...
By 3eb7988a1663 2025-10-2423:30 Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.
A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).
They put it in Paint, too. That's when I rediscovered Irfanview.
By politelemon 2025-10-2421:351 reply Apple has added it to textedit too with their equivalent intelligence enabled. You're throwing shade in the wrong direction.
By al_borland 2025-10-2421:471 reply Apple added it as a system-wide service available in any text field. There isn't a dedicated button and branding for it within TextEdit. It's there because it's runs inside macOS.
By cosmic_cheese 2025-10-2423:18 And it has a global off switch, too. Turn it off and it vanishes everywhere. Fully removing Copilot on the other hand is a constant battle.
