Q: i accidentally deleted textedit on my mac, how can i reinstall it

The easiest way is to copy it from the backup you make of your hard drive against the day when the whole hard drive crashes and all your photos and music and movies disappear in an instant.

Alternatively, boot from the system installer disc and you can probably do a custom installation of applications.

Some 10.6 Apple programs can be installed via the "bundled programs" installer pkg on your 10.6 disks,

However some, like PhotoBooth, can only be reinstalled with a #8 Reinstall Just OS X method as it has ties to OS X or requires a root level install or something.

Step by Step to fix your Mac

You might be able to extract TextEdit from the 10.6 disks using the Pacifist from CharlesSoft, if it falls into the latter catagory and the bundled installer doesn't place it back.

One thing to make sure, use Software Update fully after either method, as your bundled programs are replaced with older copies that won't work with your files sometimes, have security issues.

I gave up on TextEdit a long time ago, preferring the (free) Bean:

http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html