MacOS – Built-in GUI-based ASCII only editor for OS X

macosscripttext-editor

I am trying to programmatically invoke an OS X editor from a script which:

  • does not add smart quotes or any non-ascii characters while editing
  • will work "out of the box" on any standard mac system
  • allows the user to click the mouse to position the cursor

Sadly Nano and friends do not allow cursor positioning, and Apple lost its mind with TextEdit upgrades and really destroyed that editor!

My best hope is that there is some programatic way to configure TextEdit to behave as an ASCII editor. Alternatively, is there a third party editor whose license allows that I can include with my script to serve this need?

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USAGE CONTEXT
I have a python script that runs 'out-of-the-box' on any mac. Now I want that script to invoke an editor on an ASCII file that I need stay as an ASCII file.
I don't want to require the user to do manual configuring, I want the script to initialize itself. Ideally it would not change any global environment settings, but I can give that second requirement up, if I have no choice.

Best Answer

Any texteditor & textutil

Still intrigued by your problem I found the following solution. There is a Terminal app called textutil and it allows to convert richtext to plane text.

  • Edit and save your 'Rich' text anyway you want to (like in TextEdit).

  • Use the commandline textutil to convert your rich text to normal text

    textutil richtext.rtf -convert txt

  • You can also pipe the textutil output through sed to replace smartquotes and do whatever your want with it

    textutil richtext.rtf -convert txt -stdout | sed s/[”“]/'"'/g

    rich text

Becomes:

Hello, this is rich Text with "smart" quotes

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