Using TextEdit Instead of Mac Notes 

I've been using Text Edit forever as a copy/cut and paste tool but I never, ever dreamed it was so capable. I now have a new go-to app. Thanks, Gary.

I keep hoping with one of these major updates they'll fortify Notes with a lot of these features, like version history especially.

That’s exactly what I do. I used the note app for awhile, but now I just use text editor. I wanted to be able to see my notes in Finder. Also, text editor will recognize future dates, so you can create a Calendar event from the text editor note. Also I quit using the reminder app as well because I found if I missed actually doing the task, I would have to go back and reset the reminder date and time. I just have a to do list in text editor. You can even drag finished tasks to the bottom of the list. Great video. Thanks!

I have used TextEdit for notes ever since it was the basic text editor on a Mac 512. It is now developed into much more a word processor, but still extremely useful. I use it regularly, but I also use Notes extensively, and I have not yet had problems with accidental deletion! I also have a Notepad application (3rd party, free) which is useful for automatically working with unformatted text. I use a lot of applications! Thanks for your excellent videos.

Great information Gary, I use Textedit a lot to create short notes and use "Apple Notes" if I want specific text to be readily available on all my Mac-iPhone-iPad units.

Valuable new information in this, thanks! I had no idea that Notes was not a good place to store important information. Now I'm converting a few to Pages docs.

Another good video. I’ll stick with notes, as I use them as referral info for a variety of aspects if my life. What you have highlighted though is the problem of version control and loss if accidentally deleted.

Many thanks, Gary, for another excellent and so very informative tutorial!

There is no save as for notes to see individual files in finder. I wish this were possible as it would make me use notes for more things

Intriguing idea, but I still really like the cross-device convenience of Notes. Have said that though, you have me thinking! As always after watching one of your tutorials. Thanks Gary!

Another great educational and interesting video Gary. Thanks!

Interesting. I use Notes for some lists and travel history. Sometimes I will copy and paste into Pages or Word to edit and save a trip afterwards. I am glad to pointed out that TextEdit isn't really an option on IOS. I was looking during your video. I experimented with Pages a bit on my iPad and could see the newly created document on my iPhone and iMac. I think I will try this on our next road trip. BTW, I had to use the Finder on MacOS to name the Pages file as I couldn't figure out how to change the document name on my iPad. Thank you for the information.

I like to set a background color for some of my TextEdit notes. It’s a great cue for context.

Great video I use notes daily and it have some limitations, like sorting folders by name ...this is great! That's why I subscribe to your channel for some really great advice THX!

I abandoned Notes for TextEdit some time ago. Good video! Forgot cloud drives, which means you can have better connections with phones/tables. I use a TextEdit template to manage ToDo's now, too ... takes advantage of tabs and OLE for drag-n-drop. Bye Bye Notes.

Very helpful Gary, thank you.

I guess also if you need to lock a note Pages is the better choice. Warning- lock a note in Notes and you forget the PW, it's gone! The biometrics or PW are not saved anywhere, i.e. Keychain.

Thank you... very useful.

Interesting video once more! Have you tried Obsidian? It too uses plain text files with it's own mark-up language. Pretty much like xml. It does add many interesting bells and whistles. I'm just not into notes taking enough though. Your idea would probably work better for me. Thanks!

This reminds me of using obsidian for my notes app. It's really nice to have access to all the files.

Uber helpful video! Thanks!

Wow! Thanks Gary!

Never thought TextEdit issopowerful and useful Thanks very much.

Very useful, thanx.

Great post, thanks.

A very useful and informative video tutorial today! Thank you, Gary! 👏🏻❤️

Thanks for a great video.

Based on several of your videos and info on your blog, I've become a heavy Notes App user. I don't have any issues on my iPad or iPhone with the Notes app. But on my MBP, I can work with the notes, add new notes, move notes to different folders, add and delete tags, etc. with no problems. However, every time I close the Notes App on my MBP, a few seconds after it closing I get the dreaded box "Notes quit unexpectedly". This is just from simply choosing Notes/Quit Notes from the menu. Not sure what's going on there. I don't know if it's a capacity issue, if I have a corrupt note, or what, but I haven't been able to resolve it. It seems to save everything fine and I can work with every thing fine, but I do get this every time I quit the Notes app *only* on the MBP and not on the iPad or IPhone. I use folders and tags a lot. I have one folder I share and I have 2 folders that have been shared with me, so I don't know if it's shared folders that are a problem. Not sure it's worth it to go through the hassle of contacting Apple Support for it. My entire music library was trashed because of some corruption with my iCloud account several years ago. They escalated all the away up to an engineer. It appeared they could see what was happening, but the only way to resolve it was to create a brand new iCloud account, but there was no ability to transfer all of my purchased content (music, apps, subscriptions, etc.) to the new iCloud account and I would have had to repurchase thousands of dollars of content over again, so I'm still stuck with occasional oddities.

It would be nice if Apple were to make iOS and iPadOS versions of TextEdit available for the iPhone and iPad. Since they did the corresponding thing for Pages, they certainly could do it for TextEdit.

Hi Gary! Hmmm…never really thought about TextEdit in place of Notes. Your points make great sense though! I will try this the next time I want to make a note. But I do have two questions: is it feasible to start the note in TextEdit, save it, then paste the TextEdit file into notes? Secondly, are you saying that notes don’t get backed up in time machine? Thank you for your diligence and thoughtful presentations, always.

Super sir thanks and greetings

Are the videos suggested in the cards during the video also in the drop down section? I don’t want to stop the current video but I then can’t always find the links in the text below.

Thanks bunches

Surprised you used slashes / in a file name. Another excellent video.

Gary this a great video but how do you get it on a iPad iPhone and iMac?

Isn’t there a Recently Deleted folder in Notes? I don’t use it much on Mac, but on iPad & iphone.

I use Notes all the time on my iPhone but that's only because there's no TextEdit on iOS. I use TextEdit for everything on my Macs. I have it default to plain text so it has become my all-purpose text editor. I really like the way TextEdit can output .txt, .html and .rtf files. I'm deeply frustrated that Notes can only output .pdf files. I wish there was an easier way tp exchange data between Notes and TextEdit than copy/paste. I'm still wishing for TextEdit on my iPhone. Pages is a pretty good workaround, but it is still more cumbersome to use than either TextEdit or Notes, especially when I don't want all that fancy formatting.

I use Bean instead of Textedit. It is still a very simple text editor but has a bit more smoothness and a better UI than Textedit

I mostly use TextEdit. One strange thing I've found is that sometimes TextEdit will not copy and past into separate cells on a Numbers spreadsheet. Not sure how I figured this out, but if I paste the text from TextEdit into Notes, copy from Notes and then paste into Numbers, it will separate the way I want it to. Any thoughts on why that might be? As always, thanks for the great video.

Notes in icloud has a , recently deleted folder , stores for 30 days , so a whole note deletion can be recovered? 🤔

interesting points Gary but you didn't actually mention a reason for not using pages. Using pages you can do everything you talk about with no worries about syncing across iCloud or faffing about with file types - does that not make pages the easier option?

Where you find the app? I downloaded text editor and is not the same

when I open one of these files and also some others (pdf comes to mind) my Mac opens all of the notes or pdfs in that folder. is there a setting I can turn on or off to stop this?

Nice

I use TextEdit on a daily basis. I may have used Notes twice. I had heard of people getting burned by a note in Notes being inadvertently deleted. I just never found it all that appealing.

I have noticed that all your TextEdit files are rtf. Can you tell us the reasons for this and also the downside of rtf?

However, unlike Notes, there’s no Text Edit in IOS devices or, am I wrong there?

Like Notes, TextEdit seems to lack Word Count, something I've only found in Pages so far.

Can you share text edit files

It’s crazy that it is 2023 but there is no TextEdit for rtf or rtfd documents on the iPhone or the ipad. Seems like an apple walled garden feature.

It seems to me that Notes replaced Stickies. Sure, TextEdit is better but Notes has syncing ease. So Notes should be beefed up.

Pages files are "a little bit bigger"? Try grossly huge.

TextEdit is really underrated, it has much of the features of a full word processor. But there is one big catch, it has a fixed margin on printed documents. Why Apple did this when in fact internally it is editable, just does not have any UI to do it, has me stumped.

Clearly Apple does not facilitate TextEdit on the iPhone or IPad for that would kill the Notes App.

Great info Gary Since I primarily use my iPhone and Mac having Pages flexibility sure makes sense for me! I wholeheartedly would use text edit over Notes though if I only used a Mac