[Video] Here’s a first look at Google Keep’s elusive text formatting tools

Practically everyone who uses Google Keep for notetaking or journaling is dying for text formatting. Sadly, Google has been teasing it for over a year, and it’s still not here. Well, that’s not exactly true. Today, @AssembleDebug posted a short video clip showcasing how it looks over on X.

Yep, you heard that right – they were able to enable it! This was done with some flag tweaks and root permissions, but it was done nonetheless. AssembleDebug says formatting for your notes could be released as soon as the web app is ready to show these changes, but who knows when that will be at this point. A bit of good news though – Keep recently started rolling out Version History, so all development has not ceased on it!

The news of Google Keep getting text formatting support was spotted almost a year ago but there was no preview/video of the feature except some string and icons.

I enabled it on Google Keep and attached a video above to show how it works.#Google #Android pic.twitter.com/RekdgGyliv

— AssembleDebug (@AssembleDebug) August 14, 2023

As you can see in the video post above, the ability to create H1 and H2 headers, change the text to bold, italics, underline – all there. You can even strip formatting from text you paste in. There’s another button too that lets you change the casing of your letters. Anyone familiar enough with your phone keyboard will know you can do this natively by highlighting text and tapping the caps lock button. If you didn’t know this, you’re welcome.

The formatting options also remain constantly visible in a bottom bar and could be mistaken for being a top row on your phone keyboard. That being said, we may need to wait a bit longer. Hopefully not another year, but longer nonetheless. I’ll maintain my stance that this should have been a part of Keep from the get-go, even though the company wanted to keep it lean and simplified for all users.