I have complained in this forum previously that the loss of Simple Text in Mac OS X was deeply felt. I thought this was the case because I couldn’t find a way to make Text Edit write anything but rich text. I was trying to this using the “Save as” options, in the erroneous belief that I should see an option to save as text only.
Well, Text Edit will sure enough write plain text, but the way to make that happen is in the Preferences! So simple. (Like many things, it is only simple if you know how!)