How to Change Text Color and Background Highlights in Apple Notes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac — The Official Way

Apple Notes may not have all the bells and whistles that a more powerful word processor like Apple Pages has, but this simple text editor continues to gain helpful new features that make it more than just a basic note-taking app. One of these updates finally gives you the ability to highlight text and change font colors, adding yet another way to make important details stand out.

This new feature is included on iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia 15, all released on Sept. 16. Highlighting in Notes is not yet compatible with the iCloud.com version of the app. That means you won't even be able to see highlighted notes on iCloud.com (so don't freak out if some of your notes aren't appearing in the web app).

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How Text Coloring Used to Work in Apple Notes

Before the latest Notes update, you could not highlight text or add text background colors in the Notes app, whether you were using an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or iCloud.com in a web browser.

On older software, changing the text color in Notes is only ever easy on a Mac since there's a dedicated color picker for fonts. On an iPhone or iPad, you could copy colored text from another app and paste it in, but it rarely works. A better way would be to make a note on your Mac and write text in different colors to give you colored text to copy and paste into other notes on your iPhone or iPad, which you could then write over to retain the color.

However, hyperlinks remain yellow on older Notes versions. One workaround gives you the power to change the color of hyperlinked text on older macOS versions, but those colors are only visible in the Mac app and won't show on other devices.

How Text Coloring and Highlights Work Now

While those older tricks still work, Apple Notes now has an official tool on iOS and iPadOS 18 to not only add highlights to text but also change the highlighted text's color itself. Currently, there is no way to change the font color without also adding highlighting, nor is it possible to add highlighting without also changing the font color.

1. Highlighting Selected Text on iPhone and iPad

To start, select the text you want to highlight, then tap the Format (Aa) button in the toolbar. On the right side, you'll see a colored dot. Tap that to pick a color and highlight the selected text. There are only five colors to choose from:

• Purple
• Pink
• Orange
• Mint
• Blue

When highlighted, the font color is darker while the text background is lighter, making both the text and the text background stand out.

2. Highlighting Text as You Type on iPhone and iPad

You can also add highlights to text as you type. To do so, move the cursor where you want to begin and open the formatting tools. You could either tap the pencil icon to choose the currently selected color or open the color picker to pick a new color, which automatically toggles on the pencil icon when no text is selected.

To stop highlighting text as you type, go back to the formatting tools and toggle off the pencil icon.

3. Everything You Can Highlight in Notes

Text highlighting works in Math Notes, Quick Notes, and regular notes. You can highlight most text options in Notes using any of the five colors, including:

• Regular body text
• Bold text
• Italicized text
• Underlined text
• Strikethroughs
• Monostyled text
• Bulleted lists
• Dashed lists
• Numbered lists
• Block quotes
• Hyperlinks
• Titles
• Headings
• Subheadings
• Checklists
• And any combination of the above

When using Dark Mode, the text colors stand out more than the background colors, which can be hard to see. Highlighting does not work in tables, and you can't highlight any type of attachment or drawing.

4. Using the Highlighting Tool on a Mac

On macOS 15, you can access the pencil icon and color picker from the Format (Aa) button in the toolbar as you can on iOS and iPadOS 18.

You can also go to Format » Font » Highlight in the menu bar to toggle highlighting on and off. When on, it highlights text using the last color used.

And you can right-click or Control-click text to toggle highlighting on and off. Simply select Font » Highlight from the context menu. When on, it highlights text using the last color used.

There's always the keyboard shortcut, too: Shift-Command-E. Again, when toggled on, it highlights text using the last color used.

However, you can only change the color of highlights via the color picker from the toolbar's Format (Aa) button.

Cover photo and screenshots by Justin Meyers/Gadget Hacks