Online Text Editor

A plain text editor with room to work

This is the same editor as the notepad on the home page, given a taller writing area and a find and replace bar. It handles plain text only, which is the point: no fonts, no styling and no hidden markup, just the characters you typed. Press Find in the toolbar, or Ctrl+F, to open the search bar. Type what you are looking for and press Enter to step through matches, then use Replace for the current match or Replace all for every one of them. Matching ignores case.

The counts along the bottom update as you type, so it works as a quick way to check the length of something before it goes somewhere with a limit. Your text is written to this browser's storage a moment after you stop typing and read back when you return, and this page keeps its own document separate from the other editors on the site.

What a plain text editor is good for

The most common use is stripping formatting. Text copied out of a web page, a Word document or an email carries fonts, colours, sizes and often invisible markup with it. Paste it here, copy it back out, and all of that is gone. What you paste into the next application inherits nothing from the last one.

It is also the right tool for anything a word processor would try to be clever about. No autocorrect rewriting a variable name, no straight quotes silently turned into curly ones, no bullet list appearing because a line started with a dash. When you need exactly the characters you typed, a plain text editor is the only thing that guarantees it.

Where the text is kept

In your browser, on this device, and nowhere else. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account and we have no copy. That also means it does not sync to your phone, a different browser shows an empty page, and clearing your browsing data deletes it. For anything you cannot afford to lose, press Download .txt and keep the file yourself. The privacy policy sets this out in full.

The other editors

If you are editing code or a config file you want syntax highlighting, line numbers and more than one file open at once, which is the Notepad++ alternative. If you need bold text, headings or bullet points, or you have .rtf files and Windows 11 removed WordPad, use the WordPad replacement. For a quick note, the notepad is the fastest way in.