It’s harder than it used to be to accidentally lose all your work. Apps come with auto-save, and Chrome tries to warn you before you close a tab with unsaved work. But hit enter too fast, or suffer a crash, and you could still lose a lot of writing. It can happen to a Facebook update, an application form, or a blog post.

iOS: If you're doing a lot of writing on your iPhone or iPad, you know that formatting text is a serious chore. TextTool 2 helps with that, providing a ton of ways to transform, format and clean up text.

Chrome: Forwarding an email is easy enough, but if you want to send it to someone for a quick glance, you may want to send it via text without crowding their inbox. This Chrome extension helps you do just that.

iOS: One of the annoying things about working with text on your phone or iPad is that properly formatting it can be a bother, especially when you're copying and pasting between apps and get line breaks where you don't want them. Clean Text for iOS aims to fix that.

If you have a lot of text files on your computer, distinguishing between them can take a lot of effort. Over on How-To Geek, they remind of us the oft-forgotten feature in OS X called Summarize.

Whether you're driving or you just want to be hands-free around the house, you can make your iOS device read anything from emails to websites to articles, and all it takes is turning on an Accessibility function.

iOS: We have long been fans of Drafts on iOS. It makes it possible to link together all kinds of text with different programs. Drafts is such a powerful program that it's a little difficult to wrap your head around what you'd use it for. Thankfully, the developer's teamed up with MacSparky's David Sparks for a series of how-to videos.

Plain text has long been a favourite here at Lifehacker, but over the years most people have moved away from it in favour of specialised to-do apps, notes apps, writing apps or whatever else. I still use plain text for just about everything, but never thought much about why I do. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that snazzy features aside, plain text is still king for portability and simplicity.

Need to generate some placeholder text? Sure, you could use the standard Latin gibberish, but a more soothing and entertaining alternative is this generator using quotes from painter Bob Ross.

Android: Copying and pasting text on Android can be a bit of a hassle. Native Clipboard helps ease the pain by allowing you to double-tap any text field to bring up a robust clipboard manager. You can quickly paste common blocks of text or manage multiple items you've copied.

Windows/Mac/Linux: Atom, GitHub's free text editor, has been toiling away in beta builds for a while now. Today, it's officially available as a stable version.

The humble text editor is an indispensable tool for many developers, web designers, writers, and people simply looking for a quick way to jot down notes. But there are much better options than notepad.exe; one of our favourites is Notepad++.

Mac: Whether you're a writer, coder or simply spend your days writing lots of emails, text formatting is a constant need. TextFlow is a set of Automator actions that makes it easy to instantly manipulate text with options to change case, delete extra spaces and grab URLs.

Transformy is a clever little app for changing the way data in a list is shown. Just paste in your source list, type the first line the way you'd like your list to look, and let Transformy do the rest.

A draft ruling from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over the prices mobile networks can charge each other for transmitting calls and texts has been widely reported as meaning those services are going to get cheaper. Guess what? That's not going to happen.

Android: Copying text on your phone is already a pain, but bouncing back and forth between apps just to make a call is an even bigger hassle. Easy Copy helps fix this by letting you launch actions on your text, such as making a phone call or searching for an address.

Android: Ever since personal computers became a thing, handwriting has become less and less common. However, if you're still in love with the good, old-fashioned writing method, Google's new handwriting keyboard allows you to write words to input them as text.

iPad: Ulysses is one of our favourite writing apps on the Mac and it's now available for the iPad as well. And happily, the iPad version is just as powerful as the Mac app.

iOS: We all know text expansion is great, but sometimes it's hard to remember the abbreviations you make. TypeSnippets solves this by making it a more visual experience.