Simple Mac text editor WITHOUT AUTOSAVES

January 26, 2018 11:12 AM

I want to get back into keeping a personal journal. I will lock down the actual file on an encrypted drive, but I don’t want my text editor to keep an auto saved version on my computer that I don’t know about. What are my options?

TextEdit used to fit the bill, but it now seems to do autosaves in an invisible file in the library. Obviously, Word is out.

Could I do this with Preview? Or Acrobat?

All I want for features is the most basic text formatting (font, size, bold/italic/underline), with nothing saved outside the encrypted disk image where I’ll keep the file.

I am not looking for a file vault type program; I already have 1Password. I’m just looking for the most basic way to edit a .txt file without leaving open text on my computer. I’ve read that I can use terminal to turn off auto saves in TextEdit, but playing with the command line is not for me.

posted by myaskme to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

TextWrangler? and then write in Markdown-style?
posted by Wild_Eep at 11:16 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

You don't need to use the command line to disable autosave. It's under General in System Preferences.
posted by caek at 11:29 AM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

TextWrangler is now just the unpaid version of BBEdit (which is really what it always was, but the naming makes it explicit now), however, you would need to go into Preferences: Application and disable "Restore unsaved changes" in order to prevent a scratch copy being written to disk.

I use NValt for just about everything, and as far as I can tell, it only writes files to the folder you tell it to; it does have a cache folder, but the contents of that are not recognizable as any text I produced. It does save continuously, but only to its target folder.
posted by adamrice at 4:29 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

There is also Tex-Edit Plus, which I think fulfils your requirements.
posted by mewsic at 8:41 PM on January 27, 2018