Execute commands in the shell. In the Terminal app on your Mac, enter the complete pathname of the tool’s executable file, followed by any needed arguments, then press Return. If a command is located in one of the shell’s known folders, you can omit path information when entering the command name. Mar 16, 2021 Select any.txt file in the Finder, then press Command-I. In the Open With section, you’ll see a menu showing that TextEdit is the default app. Click the menu and select your preferred text editor, then click Change All. The Mac will remember to open all.txt files in your selected app.
- Sep 19, 2019 Console: On Mac and Linux, users usually start their preferred terminal application which then creates and connects to the user's default shell (e.g. However, due to a quirk of history, Windows users traditionally start their shell, and Windows automatically starts and connects a GUI Console app.
- Use command-line text editors in Terminal on Mac. To edit a plain text file in Terminal, you can use a command-line text editor. For general-purpose work, it’s easiest to use one of the text editors included with macOS. If you want to use a graphical text editor, use TextEdit (in Launchpad). Otherwise, use one of the command-line editors included with macOS.
TextEdit User Guide
You can use TextEdit to edit or display HTML documents as you’d see them in a browser (images may not appear), or in code-editing mode.
Note: By default, curly quotes and em dashes are substituted for straight quotes and hyphens when editing HTML as formatted text. (Code-editing mode uses straight quotes and hyphens.) To learn how to change this preference, see New Document options.
Create an HTML file
In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose File > New, then choose Format > Make Plain Text.
Enter the HTML code.
Choose File > Save, type a name followed by the extension .html (for example, enter index.html), then click Save.
When prompted about the extension to use, click “Use .html.”
Open Text Editor Mac Terminal
View an HTML document
In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose File > Open, then select the document.
Click Options at the bottom of the TextEdit dialog, then select “Ignore rich text commands.”
Click Open.
Always open HTML files in code-editing mode
In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose TextEdit > Preferences, then click Open and Save.
Select “Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text.”
Change how HTML files are saved
Set preferences that affect how HTML files are saved in TextEdit.
In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose TextEdit > Preferences, then click Open and Save.
Below HTML Saving Options, choose a document type, a style setting for CSS, and an encoding.
Select “Preserve white space” to include code that preserves blank areas in documents.
Textedit Download
If you open an HTML file and don’t see the code, TextEdit is displaying the file the same way a browser would (as formatted text).