How to open .RTX files on Windows
To open .RTX files on Windows, right-click the .rtx file → Open with → choose WordPad (commonly supports Rich Text documents), or choose another editor/word processor you trust.
Step-by-step instructions
- Right-click the .rtx file → Open with → choose WordPad (commonly supports Rich Text documents), or choose another editor/word processor you trust.
- If it opens as garbled text or won’t open, try opening it in a plain-text editor to confirm it is a text/richtext file (and not a different format renamed to .rtx).
- If you need better formatting compatibility, open it in an alternative word processor and re-save/export to a more widely used format.
Common issues
The .RTX file won’t open or opens in the wrong app
Your system may not have an app associated with text/richtext, or the file association may be incorrect.
- Use “Open with” and manually choose a compatible editor/viewer (commonly WordPad on Windows or TextEdit on macOS).
- If Linux doesn’t recognize it properly, check your desktop’s MIME associations (the shared-mime-info database maps *.rtx to text/richtext).
Formatting looks different than expected
Different programs may interpret rich text markup differently, so styling and layout may not match across apps.
- Try opening the file in another compatible editor/word processor and compare results.
- If you need consistent sharing, open it in a desktop app and re-save/export to a format your recipients commonly use.
The file contains unreadable characters or looks like the wrong format
The file may be corrupted, incomplete, or not actually a Rich Text (text/richtext) document despite the .rtx extension.
- Open it in a plain-text editor to see whether it contains readable rich text content.
- Re-download or ask the sender for the file again if it appears truncated or corrupted.
Still can’t open your .RTX file?
Recover a deleted or lost .RTX file
If the file was deleted by mistake or the drive was formatted, data recovery software may be able to get it back. Stop writing to that drive right away, because new data can overwrite what you want to recover.
Windows software that recovers deleted or lost files from PCs and external drives such as HDDs, SSDs, USB drives and memory cards, after deletion, formatting or a crash.
Wondershare RecoveritWindows and Mac software that recovers deleted or lost files from computers and external drives such as HDDs, SSDs, USB drives and SD cards.
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Security note
.RTX (text/richtext) is a text-based format, but you should still treat files from unknown sources cautiously: a maliciously crafted text file can sometimes exploit bugs in a viewer/editor’s parser.