> I am always surprised that rich text is the default.
It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.
“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”
This vaguely reminds me of Styledit, the included text editor from BeOS / Haiku.
It supports basic text formatting - alignment, different fonts/sizes/colours - but these are stored as extended attributes in the file, while the "actual file" remains plain text.
It's because RTF support was an early headline feature for NeXTSTEP, and TextEdit was meant to be as much of an API demo for the NS/OPENSTEP/Cocoa† APIs as it was meant to be a usable application.
Peep the NeXT 0.9 release notes: https://vtda.org/docs/computing/NeXT/NeXT%200.9-1.0%20Releas...
“Built-in RTF Support: Rich Text Format (RTF) is a standard document interchange format specified by Microsoft Corp. In addition to opening and saving documents in its own internal format, the 0.9 version of WriteNow supports opening and saving documents in RTF format. Using this format, WriteNow on the NeXT Computer can exchange documents with Macintosh or IBM PC programs like WriteNow or Microsoft Word. RTF documents retain most of their font and formatting information.”
And the NeXTSTEP 3.0 programming book which goes on and on and on about the `Text` object and how good their RTF support is: https://simson.net/ref/1993/NeXTSTEP3.0.pdf#G16.44605
† https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/samplecode/TextE...