TextEdit vs Notepad

Probably a Windows versus UNIX line endings thing.

Why not use a real text editor to edit XML files? e.g. TextMate or TextWrangler or something. TextEdit is really an RTF editor and not great at this stuff.

I edited the text in Notepad and now it works fine in both.

🙂 Only because unix stuff has become very tolerant of M$tupidity over the years. By using notepad on it, you've converted a normal text file into an abnormal M$ text file.

mac:~ $ od -c text
0000000 n o r m a l t e x t \n
0000014
mac:~ $ od -c ms texttm.txt
0000000 w i n d o z e t e x t \r \n
0000016

It's highly probable that this will not cause any seroius problems, but some unix text editor will probably clobber your windoze text with normal text and you'll be in the same boat using notepad on it again. In fact, ...

mac:~ wmp$ open -a textedit ms texttm.txt
mac:~ wmp$ od -c ms texttm.txt
0000000 i s t h i s s t i l l \n w i
0000020 n d o z e t e x t ? \r \n
0000035

I get a real kick out of the fact that this is still a problem decades later.

I really like this editor as a replacement for notepad ...

http://www.baradine.com/ftp/public/Pfe32/

It recognizes the difference between unix and ms text files and does no conversion unless you specifically ask it to. It's got a lot of very nice features. Hacker friendly, macros, powerful, yet light weight. Very unobtrusive install / uninstall. Good stuff.

Now that I mention it, I'm in the market for something similar for the Mac. TextEdit tastes like a bad combination of notepad and wordpad.