There are many powerful third party apps dedicated to plain text and coding on the Mac - options like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, Sublime Text, and Coda come to mind - but TextEdit is free, always available, and quite capable of handling all the basics. If you ever make too many changes and want to revert to the original configuration settings, just click Restore All Defaults at the bottom of the preferences window. Of note, you can also use this preference window to set other useful default options, such as enabling or disabling text wrap, the default font for both plain and rich text documents, and the default size of new TextEdit windows. As soon as you click the Plain Text button, all new TextEdit windows will open in Plain Text Mode.Īlternatively, of course, you can go back to this preference window and select Rich Text instead if you ever want to switch back to rich text by default. You don’t even need to close the preference window to initiate the change. On the New Document tab, select Plain Text in the Format section. To use plain text by default in TextEdit, go to TextEdit > Preferences in the menu bar. Instead of switching each new document to plain text mode manually using the steps above, why not set TextEdit to open in plain text mode by default? If you’re a budding programmer or blogger and you want a plain text environment to write code or HTML, you’ll likely want to use TextEdit plain text mode almost exclusively.

The result will be clean, simple, plain text. This includes custom fonts, font sizes and styles, colors, bold, italicized, and underlined formatting, embedded images, and hyperlinks. If you select OK, everything except for your document’s text will be removed. You’ll get a confirmation box warning you that making a document plain text will remove all formatting make sure you heed it carefully. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Command-T. To do so, make sure the document you wish to convert is open and selected, then go to Format > Make Plain Text in the TextEdit menu bar. TextEdit opens a new document in rich text mode by default, but you can easily convert a document to plain text at any time. Convert Rich Text to Plain Text in TextEdit This can be useful for removing the formatting from copied text, working with code, or reducing the complexity and file sizes of documents that don’t need the benefits of rich text formatting. But sometimes it’s best to use TextEdit Plain Text Mode, which eliminates all formatting and, you guessed it, produces only plain text.

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