dedtxt

dedtxt is a plain-text editor stripped down to almost nothing. There's one textarea and the file you're working on. No hidden formatting, no rich text, no settings panel, no sidebar, no menus full of options you'll never open. Raw bytes go in and raw bytes come out, UTF-8 by default. It's the sort of tool you reach for when you just want to type words into a file and you don't want the software to have any opinion about it.

The problem it answers is editor bloat. Most text tools have quietly grown into small word processors, with formatting toolbars, syncing accounts, plugin marketplaces, command palettes, and now AI features bolted on top. All of that is genuinely useful somewhere and completely in the way when what you actually want is a scratch pad for a quick note, a config snippet, or a rough draft. dedtxt makes a deliberate point of doing one thing, holding plain text, and refusing to grow past it. The whole design philosophy is that there's nothing to learn and nothing to configure.

It runs in the browser at dedtxt.app and installs as a progressive web app, so you can add it to your dock or home screen and open it offline exactly like a native program. A background service worker keeps it up to date without you ever thinking about updates, and it quietly recovers whatever you had unsaved if you close the tab and come back later, which takes most of the fear out of using a browser tab as a notepad. You can drag a file straight onto the window to open it, and a short welcome dialog shows once per installation and then gets out of your way for good.

Saving is handled honestly and adapts to your browser. On Chromium-based browsers it uses the File System Access API to re-save silently to the same file on disk, so it behaves like a real desktop editor. On Firefox and Safari, where that API isn't available, it falls back to a normal download instead. It's a small detail, but it's the kind of thing the app is upfront about rather than pretending every browser behaves the same way.

There's a quiet case for plain text underneath all of this. A plain UTF-8 file has no proprietary format to trap your words, it opens in anything, and it will still open in fifty years, which is more than you can say for most note apps that come and go. dedtxt leans all the way into that idea. It doesn't try to sync your files, index them, or hold them in a database you can't inspect. Whatever you type is just bytes in a file you already control, and the app's only job is to be a fast, calm surface for editing them. It loads instantly, holds a single file at a time on purpose, and asks nothing of you beyond typing. The unsaved-text recovery is the one small bit of state it keeps, and it exists purely so that a closed tab never costs you a paragraph. If you've ever lost work to a crash or an app update, that kind of reliability is worth more than any feature list.

It's genuinely cross-platform because of that browser-first approach. The same app works on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and installs as a web app on iOS and Android too, so your notepad is the same everywhere you happen to be. There are also desktop builds made with Tauri 2 for people who want a real application window without any browser chrome, though those native installers are paused for now and the web version is the main way it ships. Under the surface it's mostly plain JavaScript with a little Rust for the desktop shell, kept deliberately small and easy to reason about. The repository is mostly JavaScript and CSS with a small amount of Rust, the sort of codebase a curious developer could skim through in an afternoon.

It's for anyone who values quiet over features. Writers who want a blank page and nothing else. Developers jotting down a snippet, trimming some log output, or editing a small file without spinning up a heavier editor. Anyone who has ever opened a full IDE or a note app with a login screen just to paste and clean up a bit of text. If your ideal editor is basically a notepad that follows you across every device and behaves a little more thoughtfully than the built-in one, this is aimed squarely at you.

dedtxt is open source under the ISC license and completely free, with no account, no paid tier, and no upsell anywhere in the app. The creator, Chris Portka, keeps the full source on GitHub and offers optional donation links through Buy Me a Coffee and a couple of crypto addresses for anyone who wants to chip in, but nothing about the editor is gated behind them. It's a small, honest tool that does exactly what it says on the label and then stays completely out of your way.