Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks

Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks can reveal some of your unknown or little known features than by default we usually use.We love or hate, TextEdit is a part of OS X and both Apple and Microsoft for unknown reasons think, the default text editor should be like they are, although TextEdit is many times better than Windows default text editor named Notepad. Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks exists for that reason – it is far better than you actually know.

Introduction to Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks

It is obvious that, it is not possible to discover all these tricks and tips by one person. Unless mentioned, author has no claim over these tips and tricks, these runs within user circles, some website published; some are not published. Although this guide, Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks is intended for the basic users, advanced users might find some forgotten or less known features.

Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks

All Kind of Formatting, Adding Tables, Adding Lists

When TextEdit is active, there will be the associated bar :

A screenshot is worth of thousands words. So, there are actually quite good number of features. Most websites usually divide each in to many articles to increase the number of articles. Superscript, Subscript all are available.

Syntax Highlighting

Yes, there are lot of good advanced text editors (better to say code editors) for OS X, we wrote about all the freely available nice text editors with syntax highlighting before. However, the advanced users can try this way :

This is not intended for the basic users, unless you know what you are doing; do not follow it. We have not tested the method for OS X 10.8.3. If it works, please let us know.

Re-enable auto-save for TextEdit

You can read the method :

If you hold the Option key and click the File menu, the Save as… appears. You can release the option key to understand the difference. This is itself another trick though.

Sharing from TextEdit to Twitter, Facebook or to Mail

 
After writing something, if you hold the control key and right click inside the writing area, you will get the Share option with Arrow. If you hover over the share option, the sub menu with colored icons will appear. It indicates, it is possible to modify TextEdit hugely.

Text to Speech
Just right click inside the writing area, you will get the option.

Taking screenshot of the text in TextEdit

Just right click inside the writing area, you will get the option named “Capture selection from screen”, this is last option in the context menu (at least for me). The pointer will become a tool to select the area to capture as image and automatically insert it in the TextEdit file itself. You can export from right click.

All options of Preference menu

Preferences is under the menu TextEdit beside the Apple icon. Shortcut is Command Key and holding ,

Word Count

I personally liked it :

Other Mac TextEdit Tips and Tricks

There are many such tricks exists like dragging dropping any media file, adding to iTunes as track by highlighting and right clicking to get the menu, the obvious proofreading feature on Gesture (set from System Preferences), writing OS X and using the text to speech feature (will read O S ten), hitting Esc key to get a list of auto-complete feature and so on.