Built-in GUI-based ASCII only editor for OS X
Any texteditor &amp; textutil

Still intrigued by your problem I found the following solution. There is a Terminal app called textutil and it allows to convert richtext to plane text.


Edit and save your 'Rich' text anyway you want to (like in TextEdit).
Use the commandline textutil to convert your rich text to normal text

textutil richtext.rtf -convert txt

You can also pipe the textutil output through sed to replace smartquotes and do whatever your want with it

textutil richtext.rtf -convert txt -stdout | sed s/[”“]/'"'/g





Becomes:

Hello, this is rich Text with "smart" quotes