Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
Every time I edit with TextEdit (which I do often), I have difficulty dragging the T that indicates paragraph indent — I end up dragging out tabs over and over and can't seem to find an easy way to get the indents on first try. Is there a fool-proof way to do it?
iMac 21.5", 10.12
Nicole,
I am a patient person, perhaps to a fault, and having tried combinations of different (ctrl, option, cmd) keys, and variations of click, hold, drag — I had extremely low success in reliably grabbing that horizontal bar and positioning it. I did get tired of removing the new, and unwanted tab ▸ marks too.
An alternative for opening and saving existing Rich Text (.rtf) documents is Pages '09 v4.3 (if you already have it), or Pages v7.3 (High Sierra or later). An added bonus is that is provides, in addition to the ruler controls, an indent panel that gives you far better detail control than is available in TextEdit:
Nicole,
I am a patient person, perhaps to a fault, and having tried combinations of different (ctrl, option, cmd) keys, and variations of click, hold, drag — I had extremely low success in reliably grabbing that horizontal bar and positioning it. I did get tired of removing the new, and unwanted tab ▸ marks too.
An alternative for opening and saving existing Rich Text (.rtf) documents is Pages '09 v4.3 (if you already have it), or Pages v7.3 (High Sierra or later). An added bonus is that is provides, in addition to the ruler controls, an indent panel that gives you far better detail control than is available in TextEdit:
From your screen shot, it does not show any tabs in the first 1.5" or so. Do you have any tab stops set at all?
I played around and as long as the very top of my screen cursor was on top of the "T", I didn't have much problem with dragging around the indent icon. Too low or high and you create a new tab stop. Unfortunately, macOS does not give any feedback when you are in the correct position to move the indent marker or are just creating a new tab stop.
Perhaps you could use tabs to indent your text rather than use the "indent" marker to do it?
Also, are you using a mouse or a trackpad or what to move the screen cursor? Another possibility is using the zoom feature in macOS -- open the System Preferences and then Accessibility and then click on "Zoom" -- is the "Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom" checkbox enabled? If not, try to check it and then use whatever key was specified (I use Option) and then hold that key down and use the scroll feature of your "mouse" to zoom in and out to place the screen cursor tip right where you want. Then click and drag the indent icon (the "T") and you should see the "T" move as you "drag". Using this "Zoom" feature takes a bit getting used to but is very handy at times. My old eyes don't see the screen as sharply as they used to ;-)
If you're using a trackpad type device, maybe give a mouse a try -- I find a mouse a lot easier to put at a specific position on screen rather than a trackpad type device, but that is only my personal opinion.
Good luck...
Ah, yes. I am aware of the greater controls of Pages. However, documents in Pages are many hundreds of times larger than those saved in TextEdit, which is why I sometimes prefer TextEdit. I edit a couple of dozen articles each week and keep them on file long-term, so I wanted to avoid drive-hogs.
My writers send me .docx files that automatically open for me in Pages and, for example, a recent article that came to me at 15kb as a .docx, was 875kb when converted to Pages. But in .rtf format, it's only 3kb. Though I can save them in TextEdit when I'm done editing, that is an extra step, too.
It's not an urgent matter, just something that annoys me on a regular basis. So I thought if I can get past this one hitch I could save some time.
Thanks for your input, VikingOSX.
Ooh, VikingOSX, I just remembered — another thing I like about TextEdit is I can lowercase a whole line using the WordService plug-in (recommended on an Apple forum), which doesn't work in Pages. For some reason, PEOPLE LIKE TO TYPE ALL CAPS SOMETIMES, so it's my job to downcase them, and retyping is not only tedious, it risks introducing errors.
Yes, but if you open a 12KB .docx in Pages, you are not able to edit the document anyway, as it is translated into Pages internal .pages document format. Yes, you will get a monster .pages document when saving it.
However, if you export that translated Pages content to a different Word .docx, or as Rich Text Format… in either case, the result is a 16KB .docx, or .rtf document — from that original 12KB Word file. No storage hog there, and you benefit from the indentation controls.
Tested with Pages v7.3 on High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G5019).
I do not use tabs. Sometimes my writers space in randomly, and I usually delete those. Indents are only for convenience while reading — the edited product ultimately goes into a third-party web app that takes them out.
dot.com, I use a mouse, and I don't see tab stops working at the beginning of paragraphs.
But I was not aware of the zoom feature till now; I just turned it on and will give that a try. I know about aging eyes!
...
OK, I tried that and I believe that did the trick! Now I can grab the indent indicator on first try. Thank you!
Are you grabbing the very top of the T after a click in the body of the text area?
Yes, and that doesn't seem to help.
I click above, below and in the middle, usually after three or four tries I succeed.
Maybe use the TAB key for indent, you can set tab to desired default in Terminal...
defaults write com.apple.TextEdit "TabWidth" '4'
Grabbing the paragraph indent T in TextEdit
