How to Get Rid of Favorite Styles in TextEdit

  Matt Cone       October 5, 2007      Tutorials Mac Apps

We’ve used TextEdit since it was first released for all of our word processing and find it does almost everything we need. Recently, we decided it was time to modify or delete some of the early Favorite Styles we no longer needed or wanted to re-title to something more descriptive.

We tried everything from deleting our TextEdit plist file to reinstalling TextEdit but we were still stuck with the same styles we created earlier and wanted to eliminate. Nothing helped us find out what we needed to do, from searching the TextEdit Help Menu to the Apple Support Forums to saying lots of bad words. Then by accident, we discovered what has to be the most convoluted procedure ever included in an Apple application. Not only that, but there is no way to edit a Favorite Style, other than to create a better named Favorite Style with the same features as the one you delete.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Open a rich text document in TextEdit, or create a new, blank, rich text document in TextEdit.

2. Be sure you are in RichText format.

3. If the Ruler isn’t visible at the top of the document window, select Format > Text > Show Ruler.

4. In the Styles menu, select Other from the list.

   

5. Doing so will open a new window with buttons at the bottom for Add To Favorites, Select, Apply, and Done. Immediately above these buttons are two radio buttons.

   

6. Click the Favorite Styles radio button, which will also deselect Document Styles. This will change the left-most button from Add To Favorites to Remove From Favorites.

7. If the style you want to delete isn’t showing in the pulldown menu, pull down the menu and select it.

   

8. Choose Remove From Favorites to delete that single style.

9. You will have to repeat the process for each Style you want to delete.