It had been my intention to keep DelightEd as a pure Rich Text editor. One of the features about TextEdit which annoys me most is its support for both Rich and plain Text, which so often has me saving files in the wrong format. I wanted to avoid that in DelightEd, but understand that ability to work with other formats is important for some users.

So, rather than just enable plain text, I thought that I would go the whole hog and add support for HTML too, in this new version.

I have also widened the default window so that it opens with the full toolbar accessible. However, I am still wrestling with saving a default line spacing, and hope to enable that in a future release.

DelightEd 1.1 works in Rich Text mode at all times. Even when you open a plain text file, you still have full access to its styles and style controls. However, the three different file types behave differently when you save and open them.

Rich Text (RTF) works just as it did before, with DelightEd’s bimodal foreground colour feature there to ensure that your documents look just as good whether you view them in Light or Dark mode.

Save a document as plain text, and that strips all the styling. Plain text is also unable to save foreground colour information to make text bimodal, but when DelightEd opens a plain text file, it sets the whole document to bimodal mode for you, as if you had used the Endarken command.

This all gets more complex when working with HTML files, though, and the simple solution is to keep their windows in Light Mode, easily done in DelightEd which lets you set the mode for each window individually, and independently of the whole app and whole Mac settings.

The reason for this is that, at present, there is no supported way of setting HTML text to be displayed bimodally. Put this window into Dark Mode, and the text stays black, then on a dark grey background. If, in Dark Mode, you set the text to be white, it will stay white when you switch to Light Mode and consequently vanish. What’s worse, that’s how it will be rendered by browsers.

So I recommend that when you do work with HTML in DelightEd, you switch that window (at least) to Light Mode to display the contents as they will be rendered by browsers.

HTML rendering is performed by Apple’s Cocoa HTML engine (part of TextKit), which embeds styles to set the text largely as it appears in DelightEd’s Rich Text editor. However, you don’t get headings or similar markup. It is, though, particularly useful for opening HTML files to supply links for Rich Text.

DelightEd version 1.1 is now available from here: DelightEd11
and from Downloads above.