Reducing clutter in Drupal with Hide Formats, Better Formats, and Simplify

It's great having multiple text formats in Drupal so you can choose the version you need - even switching between Filtered HTML and Full HTML can be a handy option when you'd like to limit HTML tags most of the time but allow more formatting freedom on occasion.

But having the Text Format widget visible on every text field can use up a lot of screen space.

The Drupal Text Format widget under a text editing field

Fortunately, there are several modules that can hide the widget, making it easier to edit your pages, including Hide Formats, Better Formats, and Simplify.

I prefer to use Hide Formats on Drupal 7 sites, because it collapses the widget so it's not taking up space most of the time, but users can choose to show it again if they need it.

Simplify hides the widget completely, so it's harder to make it reappear on the rare occasions when you need to use it.

Hide Formats and Better Formats are only available for Drupal 7 (although there's a very old development version of Better Formats for Drupal 8).  Simplify is available for Drupal 7, Drupal 8, and Drupal 9.