

When in doubt, you can always choose the Duplicate button, and that will pop up a separate window with a copy of the document in plain text. A window will pop up asking if you want to either overwrite the document, or duplicate the document. A window will pop up asking if you want to convert the document to plan text.

Open TextEdit and then open the document in TextEdit by clicking on Open in the File menu.Ģ. You would want to do this when you need to strip out formatting to input data into programs that don't support (or translate) rich text easily.ġ. TextEdit opens a new document in rich text mode, but you can easily convert the document to plain text.
Macbook textedit app how to#
If you’re using something like a browser where they decided to have a keyboard shortcut for tabs- good luck switching between that shortcut and / the shortcuts that have been working for an internet millenium.Solution home General How To How to convert a document into plain text in TextEdit on a Mac I just verified there are no keyboard shortcuts to do this. If you must use a silly feature to do that, use spaces. Please don’t “break the world” of keybaord navigation so that you can have a desktop that looks “a little better”. I realize that having 100 windows can create its own problem… but were you really using all 100 of those tabs? Really? If you have something you want to remind yourself to do later- track that in a reminder system. It makes it impossible to quickly switch between content views on a laptop without going to the trackpad. It completely breaks keyboard switching between different windows (substitute “tabbed view or other view” for windows). I think tabs are one of the most ill-begotten features of the internet age.

Somehow tab view got turned on and I could not figure out how to turn it off! Frustrating because discussion of tabs in text editors are normally regarding the hidden ones inside the file that make big spaces LOL. Thank you for showing me where Apple hid this preference.
Macbook textedit app full#
For more full fledged word processing and text editing needs, I’ll rely on Pages app, Microsoft Word, and BBEdit or TextWrangler, but if you give TextEdit a try you might be surprised how fully featured it is for such a small lightweight application. I personally use TextEdit all the time for quickly glancing at simple text documents, as a plain text viewer, basic word processing where the complete Pages functionality is not necessary, quick and dirty outlining, as a quick and simple HTML source viewer, and much more. Not everyone uses TextEdit but it’s an under appreciated app on the Mac.
Macbook textedit app mac os#
You’ll need a modern version of Mac OS Sierra or later to have this feature, older versions of Mac OS do not have tabbed support in TextEdit. Why tabs are hidden by default in TextEdit isn’t entirely clear, but unlike in Safari where you can open a new tab with a keyboard shortcut, that isn’t (currently) an option in the MacOS TextEdit app.
