How to Fix Orange Text in Notes on macOS Sequoia and Get Everything Back to Black

If you’ve upgraded to a new Mac and suddenly find that random words in your Notes are locked in orange text, no matter how hard you try to turn them black, you’re not imagining things, and no, your Notes aren’t possessed.

This issue has shown up for some users running macOS Sequoia 15.5 after migrating from older Macs. Even copy-pasting to a plain text editor like TextEdit or Pages and back into Notes doesn’t solve it. So what gives?

Let’s break it down and get you back to nice, clean black text.

First, what’s really going on?

Apple Notes may look like a simple text editor, but under the hood, it uses rich HTML/CSS formatting. This means styling can persist invisibly, especially after importing older notes from a previous macOS version.

What’s happening is that:

• Some internal tags are sticking during migration.
• Highlighting and colored formatting are being re-applied automatically.
• Copying from rich text apps like Pages or rich-mode TextEdit doesn’t always strip formatting fully.
• Sometimes Notes applies “smart formatting” automatically (like math evaluation in iOS, which causes orange text too).

And even when you think you’ve stripped the formatting, Notes might be holding onto some metadata behind the scenes.

Quick fix options worth trying

Before we get technical, try these faster fixes, some have worked for users:

• Turn off smart features in Notes:
  • Open the Note with orange text.
  • Go to the Edit menu > Substitutions and uncheck any active features like “Smart Links” or “Text Replacement.”
  • Save and close the Note, then reopen.
• Use plain text via a true plain text editor like BBEdit:
  • Open BBEdit (free download) and paste your text in a new, plain text file.
  • Copy from BBEdit, then paste into a brand new Note, not the original.
  • This often avoids any hidden formatting issues.
• Try shift+cmd+C (or Format > Font > Show Colors) to forcibly reset the text color to black. But as you’ve discovered, that might not affect HTML-level styling, especially if it’s embedded.

If those don’t work, it’s time to go deeper.

The deeper reset: remove the Notes preference file

Apple Notes stores styling behavior in a file called com.apple.Notes.plist. This file can sometimes carry over borked settings from your old Mac.

Here’s how to reset it:

1. Quit Notes completely.
2. In Finder, press Shift + Cmd + L to open your local Library.
3. Navigate to:
   Containers > com.apple.Notes > Data > Library > Preferences
4. Find the file called com.apple.Notes.plist.
5. Drag that file to your Desktop (don’t delete yet).
6. Relaunch Notes and try pasting plain text again into a new Note.

If this works:

• You can delete the .plist file on your Desktop.
• Notes has rebuilt its preference file from scratch, no old formatting rules should carry over now.

If it doesn’t work:

• Put the .plist file back in the Preferences folder.
• The issue may be deeper (like tied to the iCloud sync cache or OS-level bug).

Still seeing orange? A few more things to consider

• Wait for macOS 15.6: If this is a Sequoia-specific bug, the next update may quietly fix it.
• Test disabling math auto-formatting (if using iOS Notes): Some users found the orange text was tied to auto-math results inserted into Notes. Toggle this off via the “More” menu (three dots).
• Try a different Notes app: If this issue persists and disrupts your workflow, consider lightweight Markdown-based apps like Obsidian, or even Apple’s TextEdit in plain text mode.

Final thought

It’s frustrating when something as basic as text color goes rogue, especially in an app designed for simplicity. But Apple Notes carries a surprising amount of complexity under its clean surface, and issues like this often stem from migrations, subtle preference glitches, or HTML formatting artifacts.

The good news? You can reset it. It just takes one extra step beyond the usual copy-paste trick.