TeachText

Infobox Software
name = TeachText



caption = TeachText in System 4.2
operating_system = Macintosh System 7.1 and previous
genre = Text editor
license = Proprietary
website =

The TeachText application is a simple text editor made by Apple Computer bundled with System 7.1 and earlier, and now runs only in Classic under Mac OS X. Most likely due to its widespread application in opening up "Read Me" documents which "taught" the user how to run an application, it was given the name "TeachText". It supported only plain text in the default text font (12-point Geneva, at the time) using the MacRoman text encoding, and had limited support for embedded images achieved by replacing non-breaking spaces with images loaded from the file's resource fork.

The underlying text engine was the TextEdit Manager built into Mac OS, which had a limit of 32k on text files, leading to occasional frustrated outcries among its users since it was also the default application in the Macintosh operating system for opening text files that had lost their association with a particular program and thus were "orphaned".

SimpleText evolved from TeachText which was used to distribute Readme documents, which was derived from the Edit application, a simple editing application distributed with the earliest of Macintoshes to demonstrate the use of the Macintosh interface.