One of the {libre,open}Office products can read RTF documents if that is the concern.

libreoffice should export RTF. And several other editors. Otherwise markdown (with pandoc to make it human readable / meaningful) is probably the new gold standard for text documents. Try the usuals and see, like gedit, kedit / kate?, koffice, I think even wordgrinder exports RTF files.

In the days of OLD you would export RTF because M$ based things could read it pretty universally. Less relevant these days since most things can output PDF without adobe getting in the way (much). Plus RTF was less likely to be blocked by firewalls, email servers, and anti-virus programs.

Has anyone come across any better ideas, now that you've had five years to think about it? :) RTF has the advantage of being completely portable across all platforms, and human-editable.

Ted is okay but it's not a great editor. LibreOffice bloats up the file with all sorts of print-layout code that can get really ugly if you have to hand-edit. AbiWord is lightweight but gunks up the RTF something awful (and doesn't respect system colors; I cannot use a glare white workspace). Over on Windows, Wordpad, RoughDraft, and similar dedicated RTF editors do not have these issues.

On my everyday setup, I finally gave up and installed WinXP in a VM, so I could have a decent RTF editor again. But I'd still like to have a nice RTF editor for my pinephone (which runs Manjaro).

did you try post #17 and post #18?

Then I'm afraid there's no alternative to Ted. Any word processor¹ (including MS Word, BTW) would mangle RTF rather badly. The authors of word processors don't think of RTF as of document format in its own right, but just as of a data interchange format between different word processing systems. So, there's zero effort on their part to make produced RTF readable/editable by humans. Most users don't edit RTF by hand either. They just export to, or import from it to the native format of their word processors.

There's just no market for folks like you and me that would prefer edit their RTFs by hand. I reluctantly migrated all my RTF docs to LaTeX long ago, both on Linux and on Windows. Reluctantly, because I still feel there are cases where LaTeX is an overkill, while Markdown is not enough, and RTF would hit the sweet spot inbetween the best.

Unfortunately, the things I would go down the RTF route for (tables and footnotes) are often too much for either Ted or Pathetic Writer. Heck, even AbiWord sometimes couldn't render accurately the tables I produced in RTF by hand. That would leave only LibreOffice Writer, which is too heavy for the intended use and messes up all my carefully hand-formatted RTF anyway. And if I didn't need advanced table formatting and/or footnotes, I could do it in Markdown, so there's no point in using Ted or PW for me.

The bottom line: there's no tool comparable to WordPad on Linux, or at least, I couldn't find one.

If your aim is to produce RTF then I guess authoring documents in some other format and then converting them to RTF is a more viable alternative. Depending on what source format you prefer, the converter could be pandoc, latex2rtf, troffcvt, docbook2rtf, or something else. It's much easier to find a good Markdown or LaTeX editor that suites your taste. There are a couple of less known document preparation systems as well that claim to be able to produce RTF output: e.g. UDO, AFT, or SDF.

__________
¹ Pathetic Writer from the Siag Office suite being the only exception I know of. But it was last released 2006. It can still be built from source: I did it on CentOS 8. And if you find Ted limiting, then you'll probably find PW even more so.

Funny this thread was revived right when I have the same question.

Guess what, though? I haven't logged into LQ in about 15 years, but I did to post to this thread. Insodoing, you know what I found?

LQ's signature editor: font size, juxtaposition, wysiwyg -- everything this growing boy needs.

hashtag solved!

Unfortunately "RtfEditor" is discontinued and not available for download; the interface does look nice. I don't need a lot of features, but I do need 1) not-white workspace, and 2) the output files to be interoperable with my main editor (RoughDraft). Too gunked-up and that can fail, plus good luck if you need to export to epub. And you can also start having problems like...

...oh, LibreOffice's tag nesting bug, where italics adjacent to Track Changes can result in the whole rest of the document turning to strikeout, and there's no fixing it without hand-editing the raw text. You can't just undo the strikeout, because it gets tangled up with Track Changes in varied and creative ways. If I weren't already fairly proficient at hand-editing, I'd have never found the error. (Have seen it multiple times; it's definitely a bug.)

An efficient way to de-gunk RTF is to export to HTML 3.x using something like Word Internet Assistant, then import back to RTF. Yes, a 28 year old tool from Microsoft does the best job, precisely because it's dumb as a post and strips out anything it doesn't understand.

Word used to export really clean RTF, but that changed when they went to DOCX. That, and ODT (and worse, Pages), are inventions of the devil. I have a client who lost a whole finished novel due to a DOCX's ZIP header getting corrupted (and all the backups were bad the same way. I'm pretty good at dragging data out of broken files, but all that was recoverable was a background image.) ODT is for all practical purposes the same format (ZIP'd XML).

.DOC was ugly inside, but the text was always hand-recoverable.

FreeOffice and AbiWord both export the ugliest RTF I've ever seen, plus do weird things to line spacing.

My cynical little voice opines that back in the day it was a point of Religion that anything Microsoft does, Linux does the opposite, so if MSFT developed an RTF editor, by jolly Linux will never have an RTF editor!! and once the office suites came along, there was no longer a perceived demand, because who wouldn't want a giant office suite and bloated files when all you needed was clean and tidy formatting??

Those look worth investigating, at least... thanks!

Yes, I know what you mean.
I used Wordpad often on Windows and saved as RTF.
When I moved to Linux, I had to use LibreOffice but it produces an RTF file that is bloated, filled with junk. I have a Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz CPU and it took up 2 or 3 min to open certain RTF files generated by LibreOffice. It was just a 20 page document, with some bold and color changes. Nothing fancy. No images.
That's a problem that I ran into a few times.
Then I started to use the ODT format. This is a zip compressed format but again, certain files become bloating and take +1 min to open.

Anyway, if you want to use Wordpad, install WINE on your Ubuntu. You can install it from your AppStore.
There is a WINE version of Wordpad. Open the terminal and type
wine wordpad

Or, if you want the real version, get Microsoft's wordpad.exe and run it with WINE.

I've had zero luck with WINE, tho hopefully someday it'll decide to speak to me :) but thanks for the tip; I didn't realise there was a WINE wordpad. Apparently Atlantis now works with WINE too.

On my everyday setup, as noted, I installed WinXP in VirtualBox, and use that to run the various tools I can't live without, including an RTF editor (mostly I use RoughDraft). But neither that nor WINE is suitable for slim or resource-limited setups, and the idea of using WINE on my PinePhone is just comical.

It wouldn't even need to be full-featured. KWrite with the ability to handle basic RTF formatting would be great.

Yes, WINE is very big. It doesn't make sense to need WINE to run a 500 kB wordpad.exe

I have a C++ class for writing RTF files. I can give it to you if you want to insert it into KWrite
Here is an example.

I don't understand how that works -- you mean something to recompile into KWrite?

That's a little beyond my present skillset... really cool that you can, tho :)

no, not into KWrite I guess. But actually that can be implemented/solved too.
Anyway, it looks like it is not really convenient for you. I think you can make wordpad.exe work much easier.

Yep, one can always use the workaround of a Windows app in one host or another. But it's kinda irritating that we don't have a really good native RTF editor, which in turn would be natively suitable for low-resource systems.

Or even an HTML editor that would export RTF, given that's mostly a tag substitution, with similar requirements for tag nesting. (We did that with a script in WordPerfect 5.0 in 1988, fer ghu's sakes...)

I'd settle for Ted if the durn thing would do anything but a glare white workspace. But for me that makes it For Emergency Use Only.