For those who may be unaware, Text Edit also handles plain text.
Format -> Make Plain Text
Or if you want that as your default:
TextEdit -> Settings -> Format -> 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.
Plus, 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
“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.”
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Plus, 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.