TextEdit
Text editor included with Mac OS X. Supports rich text, basic HTML display, pictures, embedded applications, kerning, ligatures and other such Cocoa text-related features. The full source of TextEdit, both in Objective-C and in Java, is included with the Developer Tools ([file://localhost/Developer/Examples/AppKit/TextEdit/] - has not been updated for Panther).
TextEdit made its debut with OpenStep. NeXTSTEP included a far superior (for developers, and IMO) editor called Edit.app. It had features like piping text to external scripts, code folding and so on.
TextEdit is also the name of the obsolete text handling manager that was used in the original Mac OS, and is now part of Carbon.
TextEdit is also a good example of how crappy the interface ends up when you use file paths as file primitives. If you move a file TextEdit will either complain it can't find a file or it will passively overwrite whatever is at the old path. Not knowing this beforehand can result in data loss.
Compare this with any app using NSDocument or most Carbon apps.
Apple's Aqua HI Guidelines are clearly incomplete since this has ramifications in the behavior of commands like Save and Revert.
Whatever happened to PaulBayley a.k.a strobe anarkhos? Did he discover girls? Or Chipmunks? Or maybe he just ran out of things to bitch about in OSX and has moved on to Windows?
It's funny that every one of the projects listed on his page are either dead or stillborn.
You can enhance TextEdit into a fairly capable source code editor using TextExtras.
"embedded applications"? What does that mean? Also, TextEdit was also the name of the original MacToolbox text editing API. The one that couldn't handle >32k at a time.
I think that TextEdit would be much more successful for Apple if they had a programmer sit down and rewrite it using NSDocument.
I don't think it would be. Or at least, if they do they should keep the old code available. There are cases where you have to manually do things that the document architecture does automatically, and the TextEdit source is a good place to look for that. There are plenty of NSDocument examples around.
Well, I meant that they would be more successful getting end users to use it as a simple text editor.
Why? What do end users care what classes it uses? Does TextEdit's current behavior differ from the standard NSDocument behavior?
Last time I looked at the TextEdit code it had a comment mentioning that they needed to switch it over to NSDocument. I get the impression there aren't too many people working on TextEdit.
it's a shame too; the editor that shipped with NeXTSTEP was in many ways far more advanced.
OSXHINTS has a thread with several suggested ways to change the TextEdit preset margins.
You can easily add regex matching to TextEdit by doing the following (taken from a mailinglist post by OgreKit's creator)
FROM: Isao Sonobe DATE: 2003-12-14 09:06
It is very easy to integrate OgreKit's Find Panel into TextEdit (or other applications).
What you have to do is following three step with zero lines of code:
1. Add OgreKit.framework to TextEdit's project.
(cf. http://cocoadevcentral.com/articles/000042.php#000042 )
2. Open Edit.nib of TextEdit.
Drop a header file OgreKit.framework/Headers/OgreTextFinder.h into the window of Edit.nib.
Instantiate OgreTextFinder.
3. Build.
From the PortlandPatternRepository wiki's page on TextEdit:
Hidden functionality: To create a page break, type Control-q followed by Control-l (i.e. a lowercase letter L).
