How to use textedit on macbook air mac os x#

The key is the first option under “When opening a file”: you want to check Ignore rich text commands in HTML files. Go to TextEdit –> Preferences… and choose “Open and Save”. Fortunately, we’ll only have to do this once on your Mac. To fix this we’re going to have to change the Preferences, then quit and re-open the file. Here’s what I see when I open a simple HTML file: 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. Now, on to the specifics of your question.

You can change that by selecting another application from the pop-up menu, then clicking Change All…. As you can see, the default is to open this file - and all files with this matching filename extension - with Safari. Notice the “Open with” area in the Get Info window. To permanently change all “.html” files to open with TextEdit, instead of choosing “Open With…” you should choose “Get Info…” which reveals the following:

How to use textedit on macbook air mac os x#

Weird!Īnyway, 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. 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. To open a file in your editor, Control-Click on the file’s icon. 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.

There are a couple of ways you can address this problem.