TextEdit is one of those applications on the Mac that you don’t hear a whole lot about. In the past I have been using TextWrangler and Smultron for my text editing. By text editing, I mean coding with HTML, CSS, PHP, and more. When I first opened TextEdit, I immediately knew how to make simple documents and change the text and format. After some messing around, I came across an easy configuration that would make it possible to code in TextEdit:
- Open up TextEdit from the Applications folder in Finder.
- Go to Preferences under the TextEdit menu.
- Once the Preferences window pops up, go to the Open and Save tab.
- Under the “When opening a file:” section, put a check mark in the “Ignore rich text commands in HTML files” checkbox.
- After you have done that, go back to your Textedit document and look under the Format menu for an option called “Make Plain Text”.
- Now you can code anything from HTML to Javascript inside of TextEdit.
- One tip before you start coding, make sure you add “.html” to the filename when you save it.
