What is a TXT file?
Plain Text File
- Standardized By
- American Standards Association (ASCII)
- Initial Release
- 1963 (ASCII)
- MIME Type
- text/plain
A TXT file is a standard plain text document that contains unformatted text, free of styling information such as fonts, bolding, or layout parameters. It stores data as a sequence of characters encoded in standards such as ASCII, UTF-8, or UTF-16, making it universally readable across all computing platforms. The format relies solely on control characters for line breaks (CR/LF) and spacing, serving as the fundamental data type for code source files, logs, and simple documentation.
How to open a TXT file
TXT files possess universal native support on all operating systems. Windows opens them by default with Notepad, macOS uses TextEdit, and Linux distributions utilize editors like Gedit or Nano. Because they contain no proprietary formatting, they are also viewable in any web browser and can be imported into virtually any word processing or data management software without conversion.