Also Pages also has a fairly decent print design mode. Sure, it can't compete with something like Indesign in feature parity, but I find it pretty useful to do posters, booklets, flyers and the like. It's free and fairly intuitive to use.
TextEdit has its roots in OPENSTEP, where it was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. It even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much maybe, they're really different things.
> TextEdit [...] was used as kind of a demo application of the text views IIRC. even came with source code, as did Chess by the way.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
Pages is an underrated Word Processor. It has the lessons of 30 years of development and experimentation of WYSIWYG editors distilled and applied in a tight little package.
https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/mac-help/mchlp1341/mac
So I guess a comparison between TextEdit and Pages doesn't make too much maybe, they're really different things.
On the other side of the fence, WordPad initially came with source code as well, and was essentially a demo app for the rich edit control as well as the criminally underused text converters[1].
[1] https://www.malsmith.net/wincvt/