Best Plain Text Editor App Mac

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A text (TXT) file contains unformatted text with the file extension .txt (e.g., macreports.txt). By unformatted, it is meant that these type of text files are plain text files without any styling and formatting, for instance, these documents do not have bold texts, italic texts, images, colors, different font types, hyperlinks, tables, bulleted lists etc. These documents just have plain texts. A TXT file can be created, opened and edited on a Mac with a text editor. An example of a text editor is TextEdit, which is included with the macOS software. Here is how you can create a text file:

Download Plain Text Editor for Mac to edit plain text files with many options. Plain Text Editor has had 1 update within the past 6 months. Plain text mode is not the default mode in TextEdit on your Mac. TextEdit was designed to be a rich text editor. In TextEdit, you can apply various fonts to your text, change the size and color of text, and apply another formatting like centering, line spacing, and bulleted lists.

EditorBest Plain Text Editor App Mac

Best Editor For Mac

Open and use TextEdit and create a text file

  1. Open the TextEdit app on your Mac (Applications > TextEdit, or use Spotlight, press Command-Space bar, to search, find and open TextEdit). TextEdit is a text editing and word processing tool that comes with your Mac.
  2. In the TextEdit app, choose File > Open. TextEdit has two format modes: (a) plain text (.txt file) and (b) rich text (.rtf file). The difference is that .txt mode will not allow formatting, while .rtf mode will let you format like adding images, colors, tables etc.
  3. Default format is rich text format. You can change this by going to TextEdit > Preferences and select Plain Text.
  4. You can also change the mode while you editing your text by going to Format > Make Plain Text or Format > Make Rich Text. If you change a .rtf file (rich text) to .txt file (plain text), your document will lose all formatting options.
  5. Create and edit your text file
  6. And then go to File > Save to save your text file.
  7. Name your file and save it.
Mac text editor built in

Plain Text Editor Download

You can also create more rich documents, you can use Pages, Pages for iCloud or similar apps. One other note is that text files are also known as flat files or ASCII files.

Best Plain Text Editor Mac

See also: Where Do Screenshots Go On Mac?