NC #1119 Deep Dive into TextEdit, Patreon Changes, Infectious Disease Specialist Dr. Bonnie Maldonado

When you first launch TextEdit, you get the familiar dialog box where you can select an existing text file to open.

But along the bottom, you'll see a button that says Show Options.

This reveals a section that says Plain Text Encoding with a very unfamiliar list of encoding options, allowing you to choose which character encoding you'd like to use.

You'll probably never need to use this.

But if you ever open a text file and it appears garbled or uses, you know, incorrect characters, you can manually select the correct encoding from this menu before opening the file.

By default, encoding is set to automatic, which means it'll try to figure out how the text file was encoded.

You can also choose from a long list of options, including Unicode UTF-8, which is a widely used standard that supports most languages and characters, or Western macOS Roman, which is used for older Mac text files.

Still, on this open window, there's another option that might be more useful.

It's a checkbox that says, ignore rich text commands.

That's kind of cryptic.

In my opinion, it doesn't really say on the tin what it does.

It turns out if you have an HTML file and you open it without checking this box, TextEdit will give a good college try to rendering the HTML as though it were a web browser.

If you uncheck ignore rich text commands, then you'll see the raw HTML in the document where you can edit it.

I opened the index.html file for my web-based time shifter clock, you know, at timeshifterclock.com.

Anyway, I opened it in TextEdit without checking that ignore box.

And you can see a small smidge of formatting, like the title is bold and there's a few elements that have the correct colors.

But TextEdit doesn't have any of the bootstrap goodness that went into making them actual buttons.

And of course, none of the JavaScript to make the app go.

But hey, you know, it tried.

Opening the same index.html file with the checkbox selected to ignore rich text commands opens the file showing all 279 lines of code.

Now, it's interesting to me that the default is to have this box unchecked because I'd be more likely to use TextEdit to edit a raw HTML file than try to use TextEdit as a web browser.

The good news is you can toggle this behavior in settings so the raw text opens by default.

We'll see that in settings a bit later.

All right, let's finally create a new document.

TextEdit defaults to creating what's called an RTF document, which stands for Rich Text Format.