Mac OS X zoom in application with mouse wheel

Per-app "zooming" (and text resizing) is common on the Mac via pinch/unpinch gestures on trackpads, and via keyboard shortcuts like Cmd+ and Cmd-, but it's not common via the scroll wheel.

Full-screen zooming via the scroll wheel can be enabled in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences.

There's no such feature on the Mac - as you say, the only equivalent feature is to zoom the whole screen, when you turn on 'Zoom' in the Universal Access preference pane. To increase just the text size, you'll need to see if there's an option for this in individual programs' menus (as there is for some browsers, for example - e.g. in Safari, select 'Zoom Text Only' from the View menu, and then 'Zoom in' or 'Zoom out' from that menu).

Command(plus)+ and Command(plus)- works in TextEdit.

I switched to Mac 1 year ago and I remember the weird feeling i use to get when Ctrl won't work like the way i wanted to.

Usually you can use Command button as equivalent to Windows Control button. e.g. Ctrl+C = Command+C

To increase/decrease size in browser, you can swipe two fingers outward to Zoomin and two fingers inward to Zoom-out.

As you will find out, zoom is much more Easier to do in Mac.

Tip: You can also Press control button and while keeping it pressed, use two finders upward and downward to Zoom the whole screen.