Ethan Hein’s metablog

If you use a Mac, that program is called TextEdit. You can find it in your Applications folder, under Utilities. If you use Windows, the program is called Wordpad, made, ironically, by Microsoft. If you poke around your Start menu among the various programs, it’s in there somewhere, depending which version of Windows you have.

Until I got Scrivener, I used TextEdit for pretty much all word processing. I use TextEdit to compose e-mails, Twitter posts and anything that’s going to wind up in a web form. Twitter had a few weeks where maybe a third of the time, you’d type a post, click Submit, and your thoughtful little missive would vanish, never to be seen again. Textedit lets you save. Also, I use it to write myself little post-it type notes. Macs come with a program called Stickies expressly for the post-it purpose that has the virtue of autosaving every keystroke. The thing is that the little stickies aren’t congenial to serious word processing, they’re more for phone numbers and other more durable reference material. Textedit is a better general-purpose scratchpad.

Scrivener is basically just an elaborate dashboard for Textedit, so it’s no surprise that they play well together. You can drag your text files from the Finder into the desired location in your Scrivener project, et voilá, it becomes a new section, its formatting intact.

Both TextEdit and Wordpad have a crucial feature in common: they both use something called Rich Text Format. RTF files can include plain text like the kind in e-mails, along with basic formatting information: fonts, bolds and italics, special characters from foreign alphabets and math symbols, bullet points and the like. There’s a related format called RTFD that can also include pictures. RTF and RTFD are readable (and writeable) by just about every computer program in the world, across all operating systems. Microsoft’s proprietary Word document format has become widely compatible at this point for the same reason that everyone feels pressure to speak English, but like English, the many different flavors of Word documents are a headache. You never know when your Word document is going to come out filled with gibberish when you pass it through to another computer. If you’re not picky about formatting, RTF is a better choice, and if you are picky about it, there’s always the PDF trick.

I suppose I could use Word and just save everything as RTFs, but I prefer not to. TextEdit is easier to use for ninety-five percent of tasks, and it doesn’t elevate your blood pressure the way Word does. TextEdit has a small number of menus and toolbars, each of which does a fimiliar and useful thing. Literally the only thing I use Word for at this point is its Sort feature, sadly lacking in TextEdit. (But then, maybe this Google Spreadsheet thing would do that for me. Have to look into that.) TextEdit has no animated paperclips, no suggestions as to how to better finish your letter or what have you. There are no bewildering menus within menus within menus. Best of all, TextEdit’s simplicity means it has a small memory footprint, so it hardly ever crashes.

On the Mac at least, there’s also the issue of Word’s perverse spellcheck. I don’t know how this all stands with Windows right now, but on the Mac, the Microsoft Office applications maintain their own separate spellcheck dictionary from the systemwide dictionary shared by every other program. A spellcheck dictionary only really becomes useful once you’ve customized its vocabulary to include your friends’ names, slang and technical terms, and so forth. Insisting that you do this twice, once for Word and once for everything else like e-mail and Stickies and blogs and Facebook and Twitter and so on would be too lame to even consider.