Depending on what you need to do, a number of third-party text editors can help fill the iCloud gap. For instance, the text editors iA Writer and Byword both have both Mac and iOS versions. If you want to write on your Mac, and then switch to your iPad, either of these apps (along with some other text editors) will allow you to do this.

While trusting your files to iCloud means trusting them to servers somewhere out in the ether, the files are also stored on your Mac. In fact, they are stored in a somewhat odd folder that seems to be permanently connected to the cloud, as long as you have Internet access.

You can see this folder from the Finder by choosing  and then typing ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ and clicking on In this folder, you'll see a number of other folders, some oddly named, but all of which contain the names of applications.

For example, in the com~apple~TextEdit folder, you can see some of the files in the second screenshot above. If you need to access any files that are on iCloud, it's a lot quicker to copy them from this folder than it is to open an application and move a file. You can even make a smart folder that finds all the documents in this local iCloud folder: see for more.