SimpleText

What does SimpleText mean?

SimpleText is a text editor made for the classic Mac OS operating system. It replaced simpler text editor programs made in the age of the command-line interface. A text editor program provides the capacity to edit, format and manipulate plain text.

As one of the various Mac OS text editors, SimpleText was a somewhat primitive text editor compared to successive tools used in today’s digital world. One apt comparison would be to Microsoft’s WordPad text editor, a generic and simple plain text editor that is still used, but only generally for specific low-level purposes, since other more robust word processing programs are common.

Even the text editor itself has become somewhat obsolete, as users have moved from the classic desktop format to smart phones and mobile devices. Text editors like WordPad and SimpleText were made for use over desktop platforms. Now with the emergence of speech-to-text technology and mobile digital messaging, the classic text editor is becoming less of a common utility in the user’s taskbar.

SimpleText was bundled with Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9, but was replaced by TextEdit in Mac OS X.