 When we sit down to write some Python code what we'll actually be doing the mechanics is we'll open a file We'll add some text Save the file and then point the Python interpreter at it and say run this So the important piece there that our next bit is to create and Edit and save text files Luckily the Mac has a text editor built-in that we can use for this To get to it you can go up to the magnifying glass in the upper right hand corner of the screen open up a spotlight search and Search for text edit all one word This pulls up the Mac's built-in text editing program and opens up a new window for you Hopefully called untitled and a blank slate an open field for you to add any text you want This is an empty text file We can add a bunch of things to it letters numbers spaces carriage returns as much as we want There are a few tweaks we need to make in order to set this up for Python coding Go up to the text edit menu Find the preferences tab and click on it under the format section select plain text not rich text and Down at the bottom in the options section Unclick everything. We don't want anything fancy going on. We want the dumbest unedited unmodified unhelpful text editor we can have This helps us make sure that whatever we type is exactly what ends up in the text editor And it's exactly what we see on the screen if you like you can also modify the appearance of the font Because we're working in plain text. We can change the plain text font Traditionally when writing code, it's good to work with a fixed width font This means every character whether it's a w or a period or a space Occupies the same physical width if you hold a ruler up to your screen They'll be the same width for every character Which means if you have two lines and they both have 80 characters, they'll be exactly the same length Text edit gives us a selection of fixed width fonts. You can also choose a comfortable font size I chose 18 so that it would show up nice on the video And then you can close this and you're ready to go Now we can go to our empty window and add some text Any text we want When we're ready to save it we can go up to the file tab Pull down select save choose the location where we want this to live Navigate to that directory Give it an appropriate file name and save it By convention we add the dot txt on to the end Just so when we're looking at the name we can tell easily that it's a text file But we could name it anything we wanted to When we write Python files, we're gonna put a dot pi at the end so that we know right off that it's a Python file Now that we've saved it we can go back to our terminal and use the Directory navigation and file tricks that we looked at in the last video We can go to the directory holding this text file that we just created an LS shows us a text file dot txt We can look at all of the details there. We can see how big the file is when it was created There are a couple of new command line commands that are really helpful for seeing text files One you can type cat and the name of your text file And that will redirect all of the text from your file and put it in the window and A similar command is more which essentially does the same thing It shows you the contents of your text file there in your terminal window This may seem like a small piece being able to create and save text files, but it's an important one We'll see very soon There are lots of other tools, of course for creating and editing text files, especially for creating and editing Python files We're gonna start with this one because it keeps things crystal clear There'll be ten plenty of time to level up to fancier tools later This is one of the last few pieces we need in place now for us to be able to write our very first Python program