Open Tex-Edit documents from a classic Mac
Classic Mac files are the trickiest survivors: often no extension at all, just a name, and nothing on a modern computer that admits to recognizing them. If yours came from Tex-Edit — Trans-Tex Software’s lightweight styled-text editor, a fixture on Macs from the early 1990s onward — this page will open it. Drop the file in, extension or not; the converter identifies formats by reading their contents, and hands back an on-screen preview plus a download as .odt (which opens in modern Word, LibreOffice, and Pages) or plain text. Everything runs inside your browser: a small engine of roughly 2MB loads on first use, keeps working offline afterwards, and your file is never uploaded or altered in any way. Tex-Edit is a small format in the grand scheme — but if the file is your grandfather’s journal, it isn’t small at all.
About Tex-Edit
Tex-Edit was Tom Bender’s gift to the classic Mac world: a fast, friendly styled-text editor from Trans-Tex Software, distributed from the early 1990s — later, as Tex-Edit Plus, carried forward as famously inexpensive shareware. It lived in the sweet spot between SimpleText and a full word processor, offering styled text, colors, and deep AppleScript support that made it a beloved tool for writing and for cleaning up text, and plenty of Mac users did years of real work in it. The wrinkle for anyone rescuing those files today is how classic Mac OS worked: a file’s type lived in invisible metadata rather than in an extension, so Tex-Edit documents pulled off old drives and disks usually arrive with no extension and no obvious identity. That’s fine here. libmwaw — the Document Liberation Project library devoted specifically to vintage Macintosh formats, the same code LibreOffice uses — reads Tex-Edit documents directly, running in your browser on this page.
Frequently asked questions
These are personal family files. Where do they go when I convert them?
Nowhere. They’re read and converted entirely on your own computer by an engine running inside your browser — no upload, no server, no stored copies, no account. Once the engine has loaded (about 2MB, first use only), you can even work with your internet connection off. The originals are opened read-only and never changed.
My files have no extensions at all. How can the tool possibly know what they are?
By reading them. Every format leaves a distinctive internal structure, and the converter inspects the file’s actual bytes to identify it — exactly what’s needed for classic Mac files, which historically never carried extensions. Just drop the file in as-is; renaming it first is unnecessary.
What do I receive after conversion, and how close is it to the original?
A preview right on the page, plus downloads as .odt — which opens in current Word, LibreOffice, and Pages — or plain text. Styles, colors, and formatting are preserved wherever they can be recovered from the file; anything that can’t be reconstructed still comes through as complete, readable text.
I have a whole disk image of old Mac files, not just Tex-Edit. Will the others open too?
Quite possibly. libmwaw, the library behind this page, reads dozens of vintage Macintosh word-processing formats, and the converter auto-detects each file you drop in. The current limitation is that only word-processing documents are converted — spreadsheets and databases are detected and identified, but conversion for them isn’t available yet. Try the files; the tool will tell you what each one is.