You can also change the default program of a file extension.

Ctrl+D In a script you would use a here document to achieve the same effect: cat <foo.txt First line.

Press Ctrl + D at the beginning of the line to indicate the end of the input. After changing the default text editor, you can open the document by simply left-clicking on the file. Redirect its output to the file and type the input line by line on cat s standard input.Then, it’s likely that the program is not installed on your Mac) If you want to use a graphical text editor, use TextEdit (in Launchpad). Open Terminal for me For general-purpose work, it’s easiest to use one of the text editors included with macOS. (Note: If you’re unable to find the preferred text editor. To edit a plain text file in Terminal, you can use a command-line text editor.

Choose a default text editor from a list of available text programs.

Click on the drop-down arrow labeled Open With.

Right-click on any text document and select the Get Info option from the drop-down menu.

Change the default text editor into another software by accessing the Get Info option. Working on a task that requires you to frequently open a text document but accidentally open it on TextEdit because that is your default text editor. How to use Get Info to change the default Text Editor on Mac You can change the text editor with Get Info settings or use the Terminal command. So, for example, if you renamed 'file.txt' to just 'textfile' then open textfile would still open it in the default text-file editing application, as long as file textfile still thought that 'textfile' was actually a text file.There are two methods on Mac to change the default text editor. You can use the 'file' command to reveal what the operating system thinks the file type is: file file.txt. By default, this will be /Applications/TextEdit.app however, it's possible for this setting to get overridden:įinally, any file that's of the 'text' type will get opened by the application bound to the text type if you just say open file.txt. The -t option means 'open the file with the default application for editing text files, as determined via LaunchServices'. The -e option means 'open the file argument with the TextEdit application': The -a option means 'open the file argument with the named application': Here are some possible answers, all using the 'open' command-line utility.

How to edit text file in terminal mac