It’s time TextEdit.app gets some love
Filed under Apple, Software on October 21st, 2007
A basic text editor is one of the handiest tools in any operating system. You can type in a simple document, edit a configuration file, view some README file or do lots of other text base stuff. Still, it seems that they are the most neglected applications in both OS X and Windows. (Linux fares better since it offers decent editors like Kate and gEdit)
Don’t believe me? Take a look at Windows Notepad. It is basically the same (lame) application since Windows 95. The same applies to TextEdit: it is virtually unchanged since OS X 10.0. Sure it can now read Office 2007 documents. But that is just a byproduct of changes to the underlying text editing Cocoa component. Apart from those changes -which are minimal anyway, no-one at Apple has shown this poor little app some love.
It’s not only the lacking functionality. Even the user interface has not seen any updates in all those years. Case in point? The dreadful tab stop controls (they can be seen on top right of the window, above the mouse pointer). They haven’t changes in 5 OS X versions. They sucked then, they still suck now. Apart from being unintuitive, those controls don’t blend in with the rest of the GUI. They stick out like a sore thumb. Seriously, are there any UI designers or usability experts at Apple that believe those things should be defended?
The point is not to have it compete with programming editors like TextMate or BBEdit. It’s rather to make it more useful as a basic and readily available text editing tool. There are several things Apple could add to TextEdit functionality-wise. Here are some suggestions, both for rich and plain text editing:
- Add buttons for “bold”, “italics” and “underline” (currently you can only set them through a drop down menu -WTF?- or a keyboard shortcut).
- Add a text encoding option for opening and saving files. As it is not all plain text files can be correctly opened (especially true for international users).
- Make it more obvious that you can add pictures in your document. How about an “Add Picture” command?
- Add support for different kinds of wrapping of text around an image.
- Add the option to show line numbers and jump to a specific line.
- Warn users when they are about to replace a plain text file as a rich text document.
