Cannot open my text edit files on my new Mac. From the external harddrive they are not opening.

Click once on that mounted drive on your Desktop, and then press shift+command+I. Then double-click the golden lock icon, and check ignore ownership on this volume. The settings that are shown are for my specific drive, and you may require other permissions. Double-click the lock icon again, and cancel the password prompt. The lock will be closed.

Those Text Edit documents may not be plain text, and instead RTF documents. It is important that you have the Open With section of that Show Inspector panel configured with TextEdit, as the only other Mac applications on Sierra that can open RTF directly are Pages '09 v4.n, and Pages v6.1.

Nah. Probably not.try doing a " get info" on the document(command+I) and in the box that opens up there under "open with" choose TextEdit,then "change all" then save it/close it/close the window

That should fix the problem

John B

Ahh..now we get further. Click on your hard drive,do a "get info" on that and go to the bottom

Of the window.you should see something about read/write privileges.click and drag down and make your hard drive read and write,or set it to everyone.a notice should come up about changing those privileges,and it should direct you to accounts, maybe users and groups.click on the lock to unlock it,enter your admin/system password,make those changes,save it and lock it up again.that should hopefully fix it

Jb

I cannot open files on text edit copied to my desktop. I can cat the contents to a temp.txt file and open that file. But when I copy it to the original file name, text edit still lacks permission.

I could open the file with Excel, however, but textedit is default.

If I understand you correctly, you can’t open an original text file on your new Mac, but a copy opens fine. That’s odd. Maybe do this: do a get info on your hard drive( command/Apple key& I key) after you right-click on it. See if it’s set to read and write or just read only. To change that, click on the lock at the bottom of the info window. You will, of course, need your admin/ login password( the one you may have used when starting up your Mac, and you had to type it in to get into your Mac. Sounds silly, I know...but....

Save the changes and close the info window( red x at the top of the window) .. do the same get info stuff for TextEdit, and set that to read& write, etc.... close the window and try opening an original, other than that, maybe zapping the pram/resetting the pmu/smc might help-and there’s disk utility that’s worth a try( you can find it under the utilities folder somewhere on your hard drive)

Good luck

John B

I did check permissions and i do have read write. This for was transferred from a remote directory where i could less and cat it but when i copied to my hard drive desktop where textedit is default, it have permission errors. I cat d the Duke to a new file test.txt and text edit worked, but then i cp to the original name and had permission error again, but the work around are to use the test filename or just use Excel or work on my virtual windows server.

It's just odd behavior.

What happens when you try? Error messages?

Rebooting the computer fixed the issue. Textedit now opens all the files.