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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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
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 tried using Pages as a cross-platform alternative to Notes, but I find that I mostly use Pages for page-layout-type documents like I used to create when I used PageMaker as my word processor. Nowadays I'm looking for something simpler for plain text. If BBEdit was available for iOS I suppose that would do, though I usually use TextEdit instead of BBEdit on mt Macs. Even BBEdit can feel like too much overhead for a small plain text file. But then I've also recently switched from vi to ed in Terminal for the sake of simplicity,
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?
The big file sizes can be an issue. Also, it is a bigger app with slower launch time and isn't always easy to see what you are typing on an iPhone. It all depends on your needs and personal preferences. You can collaborate with Pages, which is an advantage over 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.
Sure, copy and paste if you change your mind about where you want the information. Why not? Notes do get backed up in Time Machine, but frustratingly can't be restored in any easy way.
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.
I'm using RTF here to use rich text (the RT in RTF) for font stying, colors, formatting, etc. The downside is slightly larger (but still pretty small) files and more complexity. But RTF is closer to what you would use in Notes. If you use plain text then it is just plain text, which may be fine for you.
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 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.
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.
No, they are separate features of RUclips. If you click on them and then click the video link, it opens in another tab or window. So you can keep watching the current one and then jump to the other tab or window later. Try it and you'll see.
They are just txt or rtf files. You can share any files you wish. Both txt and rtf can be read by almost any computing device. rtfd (with embedded images) may be more difficult, but probably will work.
@@macmost I'd like Word Count in Notes or in TextEdit to track number of words when drafting blog posts... Typically I get word count in the WordPress editor before publishing, so it's not a real loss. It'd be nice to have.
@@JasonMcFadden You could use Shortcuts to give you word count of all of the words in clipboard text. If you know how to use Shortcuts. Otherwise, why not use Pages to draft blog posts?
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?
@@macmost so if I quit preview or TextEdit without first hitting the red button to close a file, the next time I open a different file that first one will open also. Is this normal or can I change that so they both don’t open next time? Or do I have to hit the red button each time and then quit (I’m a recent windows user). Also it only seems to happen with those two programs. For others I just quit the application and it opens fresh the next time
@@vblack7372 Oh, so it isn't that when you open a file the others "in that folder" open. (That's what you said in your original comment). It is just that you didn't close those documents before quitting the app, so when you opened the app again, the are still there. That's normal. You can close the document when you are done. Or, you can use Command+Option+Q to "Close All Windows and Quit" or you can switch your system preference in System Preferences, General, Close Windows When Quitting An App.
@@macmost oh perfect, thank you so much. I’ll use that last option. Yeah it just seemed like it was all in the same folder because I have all of them organized by type in their own folder. This helps a lot though, the last option is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again (your videos have been a ton of help for converts like me btw)
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.
Yes, margins are my main frustration with TextEdit (otherwise, I love it). My workaround is to close the TextEdit document, open it in Bean (a wonderful and free editor) and make margin changes there, save and close, then reopen the file in TextEdit. Although TE doesn't give you a way to edit page margins, it will work with files whose margins have been set to different dimensions in another program.
Not really. Still plenty the Notes app does that is unique, like collaboration, checklists, works with other systems (Google), etc. Why would Apple care if you used one Apple app over another?
![OsamaSon - ik what you did last summer [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4DIQDnu3mr4/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
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.
I keep hoping with one of these major updates they'll fortify Notes with a lot of these features, like version history especially.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
This reminds me of using obsidian for my notes app. It's really nice to have access to all the files.
Yeah. I'm also using Obsidian along with Notes.
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.
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
I like to set a background color for some of my TextEdit notes. It’s a great cue for context.
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!
I was gonna suggest Obsidian as well.
Never thought TextEdit issopowerful and useful Thanks very much.
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.
Very helpful Gary, thank you.
A very useful and informative video tutorial today! Thank you, Gary! 👏🏻❤️
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
Many thanks, Gary, for another excellent and so very informative tutorial!
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!
Thank you... very useful.
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
Very useful, thanx.
Another great educational and interesting video Gary. Thanks!
Isn’t there a Recently Deleted folder in Notes? I don’t use it much on Mac, but on iPad & iphone.
That won't help if you delete some information from inside a note. No way to revert.
Wow! Thanks Gary!
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 tried using Pages as a cross-platform alternative to Notes, but I find that I mostly use Pages for page-layout-type documents like I used to create when I used PageMaker as my word processor.
Nowadays I'm looking for something simpler for plain text.
If BBEdit was available for iOS I suppose that would do, though I usually use TextEdit instead of BBEdit on mt Macs. Even BBEdit can feel like too much overhead for a small plain text file.
But then I've also recently switched from vi to ed in Terminal for the sake of simplicity,
Pages files are "a little bit bigger"? Try grossly huge.
Surprised you used slashes / in a file name. Another excellent video.
Yikes! Yeah - what the what!? What's next, emoji? 😱
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?
The big file sizes can be an issue. Also, it is a bigger app with slower launch time and isn't always easy to see what you are typing on an iPhone. It all depends on your needs and personal preferences. You can collaborate with Pages, which is an advantage over 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.
Sure, copy and paste if you change your mind about where you want the information. Why not? Notes do get backed up in Time Machine, but frustratingly can't be restored in any easy way.
Notes in icloud has a , recently deleted folder , stores for 30 days , so a whole note deletion can be recovered? 🤔
But not deleted text inside a note.
Uber helpful video! Thanks!
Great post, thanks.
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.
I have noticed that all your TextEdit files are rtf. Can you tell us the reasons for this and also the downside of rtf?
I'm using RTF here to use rich text (the RT in RTF) for font stying, colors, formatting, etc. The downside is slightly larger (but still pretty small) files and more complexity. But RTF is closer to what you would use in Notes. If you use plain text then it is just plain text, which may be fine for you.
Thanks for a great video.
It seems to me that Notes replaced Stickies. Sure, TextEdit is better but Notes has syncing ease. So Notes should be beefed up.
However, unlike Notes, there’s no Text Edit in IOS devices or, am I wrong there?
I talk about that quite a bit in the video.
@@macmost yes, that’s why I’m staying with Notes. If I need more customization then I’ll use a word processor. A useful video nonetheless😄
Super sir thanks and greetings
Gary this a great video but how do you get it on a iPad iPhone and iMac?
I talk about that in the video. This is mostly for Mac, but you can view them in the Files app on iOS, or use another text editor.
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.
Thanks bunches
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.
Walled garden? Wouldn't it be the opposite since there are many third-party apps in the App Store that do this?
You could try Obsidian. Markdown files are much easier to move around compared to rtf.
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.
Probably some small difference in the text in each case. You'd have to look carefully and experiment.
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.
No, they are separate features of RUclips. If you click on them and then click the video link, it opens in another tab or window. So you can keep watching the current one and then jump to the other tab or window later. Try it and you'll see.
I cannot a mac drown in water and every word doc was turned into a text file. Can I turn any of these back into word docs?
I'm not sure I understand what you are asking.
Can you share text edit files
They are just txt or rtf files. You can share any files you wish. Both txt and rtf can be read by almost any computing device. rtfd (with embedded images) may be more difficult, but probably will work.
@@macmost share as in right click in finder and share via iCloud drive
@@ethanmenzel Yes, you can share these kinds of files just like any other. There is no restriction on sharing files based on the type.
Like Notes, TextEdit seems to lack Word Count, something I've only found in Pages so far.
For writing notes in TextEdit, why do you need word count?
@@macmost I'd like Word Count in Notes or in TextEdit to track number of words when drafting blog posts... Typically I get word count in the WordPress editor before publishing, so it's not a real loss. It'd be nice to have.
@@JasonMcFadden You could use Shortcuts to give you word count of all of the words in clipboard text. If you know how to use Shortcuts. Otherwise, why not use Pages to draft blog posts?
Nice
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?
Not sure what you are experiencing there. If you select one file and choose to open that one file, that's all you should get.
@@macmost so if I quit preview or TextEdit without first hitting the red button to close a file, the next time I open a different file that first one will open also. Is this normal or can I change that so they both don’t open next time? Or do I have to hit the red button each time and then quit (I’m a recent windows user). Also it only seems to happen with those two programs. For others I just quit the application and it opens fresh the next time
@@vblack7372 Oh, so it isn't that when you open a file the others "in that folder" open. (That's what you said in your original comment). It is just that you didn't close those documents before quitting the app, so when you opened the app again, the are still there. That's normal. You can close the document when you are done. Or, you can use Command+Option+Q to "Close All Windows and Quit" or you can switch your system preference in System Preferences, General, Close Windows When Quitting An App.
@@macmost oh perfect, thank you so much. I’ll use that last option. Yeah it just seemed like it was all in the same folder because I have all of them organized by type in their own folder. This helps a lot though, the last option is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks again (your videos have been a ton of help for converts like me btw)
Where you find the app? I downloaded text editor and is not the same
TextEdit comes with macOS. You don't download anything. It is already on your Mac. Look in LaunchPad or Applications.
@@macmost thank you. I now get it, is not available to iPhone and iPad only for desktop. Thanks
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.
Yes, margins are my main frustration with TextEdit (otherwise, I love it).
My workaround is to close the TextEdit document, open it in Bean (a wonderful and free editor) and make margin changes there, save and close, then reopen the file in TextEdit.
Although TE doesn't give you a way to edit page margins, it will work with files whose margins have been set to different dimensions in another program.
Clearly Apple does not facilitate TextEdit on the iPhone or IPad for that would kill the Notes App.
Not really. Still plenty the Notes app does that is unique, like collaboration, checklists, works with other systems (Google), etc. Why would Apple care if you used one Apple app over another?
Gary I can’t think of any other reason for their not facilitating TextEdit on the IPhone. This is the only reason why I don’t use it.