What is the difference between plain text and rich text?

Plain text stores only the characters you type, while rich text stores those characters plus formatting instructions like fonts, colours, bold, and headings. Plain text is the message; rich text is the message plus its styling.

When should I use plain text instead of rich text?

Use plain text for notes, drafts, lists, code, and anything you are pasting between apps or want to keep for the long term. Rich text is better when presentation itself matters, such as a formatted letter or a designed email.

Why does pasting text bring unwanted formatting?

Copying from a styled web page or document copies the formatting along with the words. Pasting as plain text, or routing the text through a plain-text notepad first, strips that styling so only the clean words remain.

Is a .txt file plain text or rich text?

A .txt file is plain text. It stores just the characters with no formatting layer, which is why it opens perfectly on virtually any device or program and is one of the most portable, future-proof file types.

How do I quickly turn rich text into plain text?

Paste your rich text into SimpleText. Because the notepad only handles plain text, the formatting disappears, and you can copy the clean text back out or download it as a .txt file.

Plain Text vs Rich Text: What's the Difference?

The difference between plain text and rich text is one of those quiet distinctions that shapes your day without ever announcing itself. Every time you copy something from a website into an email, or paste a paragraph from a document into a form and watch the fonts go haywire, you are bumping into it. Understanding what each kind of text actually stores makes those moments predictable instead of frustrating, and it explains why a plain-text tool like SimpleText is so useful for cleaning things up. Let us break it down.

Plain Text vs Rich Text in One Sentence

The core of plain text vs rich text is this: plain text stores only the characters themselves, while rich text stores the characters plus a bundle of instructions about how they should look. Plain text is the letters, digits, spaces, and line breaks and nothing else. Rich text adds fonts, sizes, bold and italic, colours, headings, bullet styling, links, images, and more, all wrapped invisibly around your words. One is the message; the other is the message plus its costume.

What Plain Text Stores

A plain text file, the kind that ends in .txt, is about as simple as digital information gets. It is a straight sequence of characters. There is no way to make one word bold and another blue, because the format has no place to record that intent. What you gain in return is remarkable durability and portability. A .txt file written decades ago opens perfectly today, in any text editor, on any operating system, on any device. Nothing can rot, break, or render incorrectly because there is almost nothing to break.

That simplicity is why plain text underpins so much of computing. Source code, configuration files, log files, and countless data formats are all plain text at heart. Programmers live in it precisely because it is unambiguous: what you see is exactly what is stored, byte for byte, with no hidden layers.

What Rich Text Stores

Rich text, by contrast, is designed to look a certain way. When you type in a word processor, an email composer, or most web page editors, you are producing rich text. Behind the visible words sits a layer of formatting data describing every font choice, every heading, every indent and colour. This is wonderful when the whole point is presentation, such as a letter, a report, a newsletter, or anything meant to be read and admired as a finished document.

The catch is that all that formatting travels with the text whether you want it to or not. Copy a paragraph from a styled web page and you are copying not just the words but the web page's fonts, sizes, and colours. Paste it somewhere new and that baggage comes along, often clashing with wherever it lands. Rich text is also less portable: different programs use different formats, such as DOCX, RTF, or HTML, and a file that looks perfect in one may shift or fail to open in another.

When to Use Plain Text

Plain text is the right choice more often than people assume. Reach for it when:

You want the content, not the look. Notes, drafts, lists, and snippets rarely need styling. The words are the point.
The text is going somewhere that controls its own formatting. Content management systems, code editors, and many web forms style text themselves and prefer to receive it clean.
You need it to last or to travel. A .txt file is the most future-proof, universally readable document there is.
You are pasting between different apps. Plain text drops in cleanly instead of importing a foreign program's styling.
Privacy or simplicity matters. A plain note in an in-browser tool like the notepad has no hidden metadata riding along.

Rich text earns its keep when presentation is genuinely part of the message: a formatted proposal, a designed email, a printed document. The skill is knowing which situation you are in and not defaulting to heavy formatting out of habit.

Why Paste-as-Plain-Text Matters

This is where the distinction becomes a daily habit worth building. When you copy text from a web page or a document and paste it straight into another document, you usually bring the source's formatting with it. That is why pasted text so often arrives in the wrong font, an odd size, or a jarring colour, and why it refuses to match the surrounding paragraph. The fix is to paste as plain text, which strips every bit of formatting and drops in just the words, ready to take on the styling of wherever it lands.

Most programs offer a shortcut for this, often something like Ctrl+Shift+V (or Cmd+Shift+V on a Mac), but they are inconsistent and easy to forget. A reliable alternative is to route the text through a plain-text tool. Paste your copied content into SimpleText, and because the notepad only handles plain text, the formatting is simply gone. Copy it back out and it is clean. The guide to removing formatting from copied text covers this routine step by step, including tidying up the stray spacing and line breaks that formatted text tends to leave behind.

The Humble .txt File

When you want to save plain text, the file to reach for is the .txt. It carries none of the version headaches of proprietary document formats and opens instantly everywhere. If you write a note in an online notepad and want to keep it, downloading it as a .txt gives you a copy that will still open cleanly on any machine you own now or later. It is the digital equivalent of writing on paper: modest, universal, and hard to break.

The Bottom Line

Plain text and rich text are not rivals so much as tools for different jobs. Rich text exists to make documents look polished and finished. Plain text exists to keep words clean, portable, and free of hidden baggage. For notes, drafts, code, data, and anything you are moving between apps, plain text is usually the smarter, safer default, and it is exactly what the notepad is built to give you. Once you can tell the two apart, that moment when pasted text goes strange stops being a mystery, and you will know precisely how to fix it.