Now, if you just drag and drop an HTML file (.htm or. html) onto TextEdit, it’s going to open it in Rich Text format - in other words, it looks like the web page, with text styling and table formatting. To actually see and edit the HTML code, we need to open the document from within TextEdit and tell the app to ignore the HTML commands it sees. To open an HTML file for editing, be sure to click Options, then check the Ignore rich text commands checkbox. This is easy to do: Select File > Open… from the menu bar, then click the Options button in the Open dialog.

As you can see in the image above, there’s a checkbox titled “Ignore rich text commands” - check the box, and when you open an HTML file you’ll see the code instead of a web page without pictures. If you decide to use TextEdit as your “go-to” HTML editor, you’re not going to want to check that box every time. No problem, as there’s a way to get TextEdit to open those files as code every time. In TextEdit > Preferences, click on the Open and Save tab, then click the checkbox next to “Display HTML files as HTML code…” Now if you drag and drop an HTML file onto TextEdit or open it from File > Open, it is opened as code. Now, one thing that you may need in TextEdit is a way to go to a particular line number. Let’s say you have an error on line 56 of your HTML code there are no line numbers visible in the text! Just go to Edit > Find > Select Line (or press Command (⌘) – L, then type in the line number.

If you are going to be sending out a small rich text file as documentation for a Mac app you’ve written (or any other reason), and you want to make sure that the recipients of the file know who wrote it and whether or not the file is copyrighted, that information can be added in Preferences.įrom the menu bar, select TextEdit > Preferences, and make sure you’re looking at the New Document tab.

About halfway down the preference pane is a section titled “Properties” where Author, Organization, and Copyright information can be entered (see image below). The first time a media item is added to the document, you are asked to convert the document to an RTFD format.Ĭlick Convert to have the document directly converted to the.

The equivalent of notepad for mac