Simple Steps to Create Plain Text in TextEdit

TextEdit is a word processor and text editor that comes with all Mac computers. Once launched, its dialog box will ask if you want to open a document or create a new one. Compatible with many types of document formats (including TXT, RTF, RTFD, RTA and HTML), TextEdit provides basic tools for users to handle most writing tasks.

Today’s topic is: how to convert a RTF file to TXT one using TextEdit? Or we can say, how to create Plain Text in TextEdit? The plain text mode will eliminates all the formatting and produce only plain text. You can take the following steps to easily convert a document (for instance, RTF) into plain text:

• Open up TextEdit from the Applications folder, Launchpad, or Spotlight.
• Open the document you want to covert to plain text in TextEdit.
• Click on the “Format” at the menu bar, and choose “Make Plain Text”. Alternatively you can use the keyboard shortcut Command + Shift + T to make that happens.
• Click on “OK” in the confirmation dialog, and save the file into a TXT document.

Note that, once you click on OK button, all formatting in the original document will be removed, and subsequently you will get clean, simple and plain text. Surely you can convert the TXT document into the RTF format, but your original formatting will not be back. So make a copy of the document if you want to retain the format.

By default, TextEdit opens a new document in rich text mode. If you find yourself need to create plain text documents often, you can set the TextEdit to create plain text as default format. Personally, I want to use plain text mode almost exclusively when I am writing blog articles. So I will set up TextEdit to open in plain text mode by default. Here are the instructions to make TXT the default format in TextEdit:

• Launch TextEdit, click on “TextEdit” > “Preferences” in the menu bar.
• On the “New Document” tab, select “Plain text” under the “Format” section.

 

As soon as you choose the “Plain text”, all the new opened TextEdit windows will be in plain text mode. Of course you can select “Rich text” from there if you want to switch back. Many other options are available in the Preferences panel too. There are many 3rd party apps dedicated to plain text on Mac like TextWrangler, Sublime Text, and Coda. But for me, TextEdit is powerful enough to cover my needs.

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