How can I prevent TextEdit from starting each line with an uppercase character

In TextEdit, if I type a lowercase character as the first character on a line, it is converted to uppercase. The only way I have found to make it lowercase is to retype it. This is annoying and I would expect some way of telling TextEdit to preserve what I type, not automatically make changes that it thinks I intended, but did not.

Such a mechanism is usually in preferences. However, TextEdit 's preferences does not supply that capability. So, it there some other way to make TextEdit do what I want? If not, is there a better 3rd party tool I can use, instead of TextEdit that does what I want, and perhaps provide additional functionality? If so, I'll just delete Apple's TextEdit and create a link to the 3rd party tool and call it TextEdit.