A year and a half ago I vibe-coded a tool, Eat The Richtext, that I've been using practically every day (every week in any case) ever since. Friends tell me they continue to use it as well. I think that means it's time for it to graduate from the blurb I put on LessWrong to a proper LessWrong post.

Ok, you know how sometimes you copy/paste a chunk of text into Discord or GitHub Issues or a text message or anywhere else that doesn't support rich text (aka RTF)? And then alllll of the following formatting disappears?

Italics and bold
Sub- or superscripts, like a2 + b2 = c2
The numbers in a numbered list
The bullets in a bulleted list
1. Also nesting of lists
Hyperlinks like eat-the-richtext.dreev.es
Tables
Headers and subheaders
Blockquotes
Strikethrough

It's the italics that are insidious in particular, since they're hard to reliably spot and the meaning of the text can (occasionally) totally change if they're stripped. This drives me bananas.

If you use various editors that support markdown, like Obsidian or Notion, they may have the solution to this built in. Copy the rich text in, copy markdown back out.

The rest [...]

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First published:
November 18th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fFu4tZom8twYdEyeD/eat-the-richtext

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Split-screen comparing rich text formatting in editor and plain text output.

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“Eat The Richtext” by dreeves

LessWrong (30+ Karma)