Notepad is plain text, while those wanting to send files with Word-like formatting capability can save the file in RTF format, and it will open anywhere, i.e., macOS and Linux.

A Rich Text Format document, or RTF, is a file type recognized by most word processing applications. While RTF documents support numerous features, those features generally make for larger file ...

The Rich Text Format extension refers to a document-based file format used and recognized by prominent word processing applications. However, businesses may opt to rely on the format to meet ...

Choose Pages and, sure enough, that application launches and converts your AppleWorks document to a .rtf file, complete with the document’s original formatting. Similarly, ...

As such, I save documents in TextEdit’s default .rtf file format. I prefer this because RTF files are widely supported and can be opened by almost any application.