If you want to automate some tasks on your Mac, there are 10 awesome things to try and this Mac Automator tutorial shows you how. IPhone Apps; iPad Apps. Replace Text is the one used in this example, so enter the text you want to replace and with what. Click the Text button (the one marked with a “T”) to add text to photos. Once you click the button, the word “Text” will appear on the image, flanked by a pair of blue handles. Double-click the text and start typing to add your own text, or click and drag to move the text wherever you’d like.
I wrote all of my web site’s code using SimpleText in MacOS 9. Recently I made the step up to OS X and I’ve transferred all of my data from my old G-4 to the new system. When I open the html pages in TextEdit on OS X I am unable to go in and edit the code. Instead I get a screen that reads the the html and presents a page like one would see on the web. Is it possible to edit the html that was written in SimpleText and still keep it as a text file?
There are a couple of ways you can address this problem. First off, in Mac OS X, files with “.html” filename suffixes are automatically associated with Safari, the Web browser, so if you double click on them, you don’t get to an editor at all.
To open a file in your editor, Control-Click on the file’s icon. You’ll see:
You can see here that, oddly enough, I have three different versions of TextEdit on my own computer running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.2. Weird!
Anyway, that’s the general technique you can use to open any file in Mac OS X with any of the set of applications that are known to handle that particular file type.
To permanently change all “.html” files to open with TextEdit, instead of choosing “Open With…” you should choose “Get Info…” which reveals the following:
Notice the “Open with” area in the Get Info window. As you can see, the default is to open this file — and all files with this matching filename extension — with Safari. You can change that by selecting another application from the pop-up menu, then clicking Change All….
Now, on to the specifics of your question. You ask why it is when you open up an HTML file that TextEdit shows you the formatted text rather than the actual HTML source. Great question!
Here’s what I see when I open a simple HTML file:
Not good. To fix this we’re going to have to change the Preferences, then quit and re-open the file. Fortunately, we’ll only have to do this once on your Mac. Go to TextEdit –> Preferences… and choose “Open and Save”. You’ll see:
The key is the first option under “When opening a file”: you want to check Ignore rich text commands in HTML files. Check that option, then quit TextEdit.
Now, open up the HTML file again, and here’s what you’ll see:
Much, much better.
It turns out you can also do this by manually selecting File –> Open…, choosing the file, and also selecting the option in the Open dialog window of “Ignore rich text commands”, but since i’m always double-clicking on files or otherwise launching TextEdit, it’s a much easier solution to simply fix the preferences and never worry about it again.
Kind of a pain, but that’s your solution path. Good luck with your editing!
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It’s happened to all of us: A colleague sends an image that you’d like to edit, but when you double-click on it, Preview launches instead of Adobe Photoshop. Or, you save a text-only document from Microsoft Word and when you later open it from the Finder, it launches TextEdit instead.
Before OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), when you double-clicked on a file it would always open in the application that created it. Now, native documents (that is, .doc or .docx files for Word, .indd files for Adobe InDesign, and so on) still open in their parent applications, but common file types—for instance, .txt, .jpg, and .html—open in more generalized applications, such as Apple’s TextEdit, Preview, or Safari.
Whether or not you like Snow Leopard’s new approach, you can always control which application opens a file. The Open With command and its variations let you temporarily override, or completely reassign, where your documents open—as long as you choose an application that knows how to interpret the document’s information. And, if you’re working in OS X 10.5 (Leopard), where a double-clicked file always looks for its creator instead of a pinch-hitter, these commands are still very useful when you want to open documents with something other than their parent applications.
How To Open The Text Thing For Mac Terminal
Open With: Just this document, just this time
A friend has e-mailed a rough draft of a document created in TextEdit and saved in Rich Text (.rtf) format. You want to edit it in Microsoft Word. Sure, you can use Word’s Open command (as long as you set the Enable pop-up menu in its Open dialog box to All Readable Documents), but Word isn’t running yet, and you’re looking at the document’s icon in your Downloads folder. Just select the icon, choose File -> Open With, and select Microsoft Word from the submenu. Or, Control-click (right-click) on the file’s icon and choose Open With -> Microsoft Word from the contextual menu. This time the file will open in Word. The next time you double-click on it, it will revert to opening in TextEdit.
The time-honored tradition of a “force open” still works, too: dragging a document onto an application’s icon in the Dock or in the Applications folder has the same result as using the Open With command.
Tip You don’t have to save an e-mail attachment first to open it in something other than its default application. If you’re using Apple’s Mail, you can Control-click (right-click) on the attachment’s icon in the message window to see a contextual menu that includes the Open With command.
Always Open With: Just this document, from now on
Snow Leopard opens JPEG images in Preview. You may find this a perfectly good solution most of the time if all you want to do is flip or rotate the image, or perhaps save it in a different format such as TIF or PNG. But in this case, you want to open the JPEG in Photoshop for more advanced alterations and you know you’ll be editing the image repeatedly.
Select the file in the Finder. Hold down the Option key and choose File -> Always Open With, and then select Adobe Photoshop from the submenu. (Alternatively, you can open the File menu and then press Option, which changes the Open With command to Always Open With.) From now on, this file will open in Photoshop while other JPEGs continue to open in Preview.
You can also access the Always Open With command from a Finder’s contextual menu, but you must press Option after you’ve opened the contextual menu to change the Open With command to Always Open With. Pressing Option before or as you open the contextual menu doesn’t alter the command.
Change All: Every document like this, always
Personally, I like all JPEGs to open in Photoshop. Even if the application is overkill for what needs to be done, I usually have it open already, and I have all sorts of keyboard shortcuts and macros that speed things along. In your case, perhaps you use Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit or Adobe Dreamweaver to create Web pages, and you’d rather your HTML files open in that application than in Safari (or the default browser that you’ve specified in Safari’s preferences).
It’s easy to specify a new default application for a document type that can open in any of several applications. Working in the Finder, select the icon of a file of that type and choose File -> Get Info. In the Info window, expand the Open With section if necessary, and select your preferred application from the pop-up menu. Click the Change All button and then click Continue in the confirming dialog box. Now this file type will always open in the application you prefer.
Mac author Sharon Zardetto has finally torn herself away from reading on her iPad and gotten back to writing about the finer points of using the Mac.