TextEdit vs. Pages

A few days ago, Allison Sheridan wrote a very persuasive article about using TextEdit, the “unsung hero of macOS,” as a simple word processor. I’ve been trying it out and… I’m going to stick with Pages. Let me explain why. First, you should know that I almost never use a word processor. The overwhelming majority of my writing over the past 30 years has been done in a text editor, and its plain text is then fed to some sort of formatting software—Markdown or LaTeX, typically—to set the styles for all the parts. But with one-off documents, the styles I use for blog posts and technical reports don’t make sense. A note for someone who’s coming over to water my plants while I’m out of town shouldn’t look like an analysis of a mobile crane tipover accident. That’s where a word processor comes in handy. It’s much faster to change fonts, sizes, and margins in a word processor than in a LaTeX preamble. Allison got on my good side early in the article when she complained about the ribbon in…