Dear Apple.

[tyggerjai]

Ordinarily, I love your textedit program. It's a neat little text editor. Edits text really nicely. Great for those moments when I need to edit text.

And I love safari. Ace web browser. Renders HTML really nicely. Great for when I have an HTML page I really want to render.

So why the *FUCK* would you assume that when I open a .html file in TextEdit, it's because I really, *really* enjoy the crappy, half-arsed, effectively USELESS HTML-rendering capabilities of Textedit? IF I OPEN IT IN TEXTEDIT IT'S BECAUSE I WANT TO EDIT IT AS A TEXT FILE. YOU FUCKING MORONS.

Thanks for listening.

sol.
.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

*APPLAUSE*

I hate it when text editors do that as well...

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

There are others?
I assumed this was an appleism, in their rush to be "helpful".

See, I use vi in an xterm-equivalent, usually, so I've never noticed. The only other text editor I use with anything even vaguely resembling regularity is kate, which also seems to handle them fine, except that the file select box in the new kate is broken.

So it's not, actually, a problem I've ever come across before. Thank goddess for my insular, unix-centric world-view!

sol.
.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

TextEdit predates Safari by a long way, and it's supposed to be more of a mini-word-processor than a plain text editor: that's why it's got all that stuff in there for doing RTF.

For it HTML is just another rich-text format. It's not a case of being "helpful", it's a case of the thing having been poorly named.

Personally, I use TextEdit only when I'm writing something that needs to be printed, like a nastygram to my real-estate agent. For plaintext, I'll use a vi-alike or whatever.

See you've got it *all* wrong

[subtle-eye.livejournal.com]

The "Official Apple" way of editing "complicated media" like .html is
to hide all that inconvenient stuff. Like you have to go poking around
in /Applications/Utilities to get a shell.

So either download BBEdit Lite, or SubEthaEdit
(http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/) and edit your text the way "god" intended. Trust me SEE is like sex, it gets cooler as you add more people.

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Jai

Thank you for your constructive comments about TextEdit. We receive
a number of queries about this product and are always keen to hear
feedback from our valued customers. We are currently addressing
several issues with the product as raised by our customers and we
assure you that everything possible is being done to ensure that our
products contine to not only provide a high level of technical
excellence but also to provide a simple, effective and user-friendly
interface to promote the use of our products amongst a wide range of
users.

Again, thank you for your feedback. We will be considering your
letter very seriously, as we do all mail we receive about our product.
We hope that we can continue to excel in our service, our customer
approach and our outlook for the future.

Love, Apple.

PS: WE'RE SO BLOODY RICH! WE DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU LITTLE PEOPLE! SO
BLOODY RICH! HA HA HA HA HA! LOOK AT ALL OUR CASH! WE'RE SO BLOODY
RICH! WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MONEY? HA HA HA HA HA!

xxx

ooo

Indeed.

[tyggerjai.livejournal.com]

ISTR the Terminal alias was on my dektop as soon as I fired up OSX, but it may just have been the first alias I dragged on there.

I will try SEE, but I don't, to be honest, do a lot of text editing on the Mac - mostly browsing and AIM, to free up my main monitor for, well, text editing...

sol.
.

[longi.livejournal.com]

See, I use vi in an xterm-equivalent

...and Apple know this. That is why they gave you useless ugly output.

You own several Amigas. Fire one up and run CygnusEd Pro. Still the greatest editor I've ever seen. It was a 265k binary, and is still the only editor I've found with a variable vertical block cut. If anyone else knows of an editor for X11 that does variable vertical cut and paste, fast smooth scrolling, regex replace, and has a nice configurable window with an optional toolbar, and if you're really good, a REXX extention API, I'll be very impressed. Fucking ecstatic even.

But I've been using emacs since version 18.something (mid 1980's) for large jobs, and GNU Nano (http://www.nano-editor.org/) for quick scribbles. (What the fuck is Nano? It's pico with the useless search replaced with a decent Regex search and replace and repeat and scrolling that isn't blocky like picos. :)