Why we made it
One day we noticed that three of us had a habit of keeping an “Untitled” tab open in a text editor. It was never saved, still there after every restart. We used it to strip formatting before pasting into emails and forms. One of us even kept quick to-dos there because a task app felt like too much for him. Another kept piling up notes in there that didn’t deserve a file. And we all liked working with plain text.
So we built Unrich, initially for ourselves. At first it was just a window you could bring up from any app to paste text, clean it, work on it and copy it somewhere else. Rich text in, plain text out. Hence the name :)
Then we added a diff to show what the cleanup changed, including unwanted invisible characters you wouldn’t otherwise notice. Notes could be split, merged and moved around. Focus View gave us room to work on one note. We added plenty of keyboard shortcuts, so you can bring it up, move between notes, edit and copy text back without reaching for the mouse. Bit by bit it became more.
Using Unrich every day gave us more ideas: boards and columns for snippets we wanted side by side, Markdown cleanup for text that needed more structure, and Temporary Secrets for passwords we didn’t want to keep. The app grew out of what we found useful ourselves.
Now Unrich holds our email drafts, snippets we need tomorrow, notes from calls and half-written answers for web forms. It is open on our Macs all day, and we think it might be useful for others too.
Say “Unrich” the German way, [ˈʊnʁɪç], and it sounds like a knight’s name. Sir Unrich, defender of plain text.