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I used to be able to press ⌘-spacebar, type "te", and spotlight would open a new TextEdit document for me, ready to be used.

But now, I get a stupid open dialog box asking for opening a document or starting a new one. It's only an extra step, but it's really annoying.

I was talking on the phone, ready to take some notes that way, and it took a few sentences before I noticed nothing was being written because of that damned window.

I've searched the preferences, but I don't see any switches to turn it off. Do any of you know how to get rid of it, or is it one of those Apple-enforced "good ideas"?

Thanks!

I noticed this quite a while ago, and couldn't find a way to get it work as it did before. I usually start with a plain text document, so I had to go through that step as well. So I created a blank textedit document, made it "stationary", and dragged it to the right hand end of the doc. Now when I want a new window I just click on that. You could also give the blank doc a unique name and open it via spotlight. I did the same for Numbers -- it goes through a series of useless steps when it starts up too. But you can't make a Numbers document stationary, so I had to lock it instead.

Of course! That's a great idea.

Thanks, Bays!

Hmmm... I just discovered this annoyance has to do with iCloud Drive. If you go to System Preferences>iCloud Drive>Options, TextEdit can be unchecked and turned off right there. Now it opens blank, as it used to.

I haven't used iCloud much yet, so I'm not sure about its details, but even with that option turned off, it still syncs. The only thing I noticed is that with the TextEdit off, its corresponding folder TextEdit folder in the Finder goes away (with whatever it had inside, apparently). But it still syncs if you place the TextEdit docs outside the TextEdit folder, so I'm not sure what that means...

There's something in Ars Technica about this. The only way to stop it is to start a document, and save it when to your local drive when it's blank. I've turned document sync off in preferences. I don't think it's ready for general use.