Text Editing
First let’s make sure we understand the difference between text editing (just text with no formatting) and word processing (with font, style, and a million types of formatting control to make your document look nice). I have to say that it is one of my pet peeves when someone emails me a Word document that only has a little text in it with no fancy formatting at all. Word takes forever to load on many machines and it is often totally unnecessary to require any word processor when a text file will do. However, fancy HTML-encoded documents are all the rage even if it’s only a shopping list you are writing.
In Windows, Notepad and Wordpad are primarily text editors and the default is just plain text, denoted by a .txt suffix. However, they do have some formatting capabilities built in. You probably use one over the other or maybe like me you never use them at all (I use emacs).
On the Mac, the built-in TextEdit application does even more fancy editing and the default format for new files is RTF (Rich Text Format). One can do kerning, use ligatures and lots of fancy things that most people don’t know or care about. However, you can use it to create plain old text files. Go to the TextEdit Preferences (under the TextEdit menu or type Command-,). In the New Document section the very first part is Format. Click on the Plain Text radio button and then when you create a new TextEdit document it will be in plain text.
The default plain text encoding is UTF-8 (or 8 bit Unicode) which is fine. There are many alternative choices. If you want to exchange files with a Windows computer you can choose Western (Windows Latin 1) and I assume it will do the right thing with carriage returns and line feeds.