people who like rtf should really switch to markdown

If you write documents at all on your computer, this matters.

RTF. That's Rich Text Format, a document file type originally introduced in 1987. Yeah, it's that old. The only reason anybody knows about this format is because of WordPad, the built-in basic document editor in Windows 95 all the way to Windows 11 (but not for long, which I'll get to in a moment). Prior to WordPad, the basic Windows rich text editor was Write.

There are still people to this day who are all about their RTFs, and it's for one reason.

Speed.

Before getting into that, it used to be the way that all GUI document editors were lickety-split lighting fast in Windows. Whether it was WordPad, Microsoft Works (remember that one?) or Microsoft Office, you could double-click a DOC and whammo, it would open right up with almost no wait time. It was great.

Microsoft Works went away, and Microsoft Office over time got slower... and slower... and slower... to the point where if you wanted that lickety-split speed back, you had to use something else. Sure, there was OpenOffice and LibreOffice, but nope, not fast enough.

Then came internet-based document editors. It didn't speed anything up. Instead of waiting for a program to launch, now you're waiting for an internet-based app to load. And if you're required to login just to edit documents along with 2FA authentication, yep, add that to the time you have to wait just to edit a document. Ridiculous.

This is why people still use WordPad. RTF is an ancient file format, but that's what WordPad uses, and it's got that lickety-split fast speed that never went away. Everything about it is lightning quick. Quick to launch, quick to edit, quick to save.

WordPad has very little in the way of features, but when you want a document editor that has rich text features that's fast-fast-fast and just works, WordPad is really nice...

...or at least it used to be.

Windows 11 no longer auto-installs WordPad on clean installations of the OS, and you probably won't see it any more at all in future Windows.

This is where markdown saves the day. It's a different way of editing documents, but once you get used to it, you get all the speed back.

Markdown documents can be made using any plain text editor. Notepad, Notepad++, Kate, nano, Vim, whatever. All that needs to be learned is how markdown works. Do an internet search for "markdown cheat sheet" and you'll see what I mean.

After that, all you need is a markdown viewer.

In Linux using nano, this is an example of what editing a markdown document would look like:

Yes, you can include images. For local images (which is the smarter way to go about it), you can keep things easy just by keeping image files in the same folder you save your MD files to.

This is viewing the markdown document with Okular:

There are also web browser markdown viewers. In Chrome, for example, just go to the Chrome Web Store, search "markdown" and the viewer will be one of the first results. Firefox has it also.

The greatest thing about a markdown document is that no standard program/app is required to edit one. Again, use any text editor you want, save as file.md or whatever you want to name it, and that's it.

You get your bold/italic/strikethrough/whatever, but more importantly you get the speed back that you lost.

In fact, you can load/edit MD documents faster than RTF since there's barely any overhead when using a plain text editor.

Some people like markdown so much that it's the only format they use for documents. When you want all the speed and something that formats text and can include images, you really can't do much better than markdown.

Published 2025 May 27