Newbie. What's going on with this ediff colors on my file?

So I was playing around with diff-buffers and ediff-buffers. I had no idea what I was doing, and I ended up with my primary notes.org file containing highlighted sections, saved to disk. I didn't know how to get rid of this formatting, so I restored it from the backup notes.org~, as I had only made a minor change (thank goodness). Here's the two files, the original (restored), and the ediff highlighted file: https://i.imgur.com/K7340jK.png Now my questions are as follows: 1. I thought org files were visible text only files, editable in any other text editor. But it's clearly saving the highlight features with the text. How is it doing that? What is the format? 2. If I end up with something like this on the right again, how can I strip all the highlight formatting, so I get back to what's shown on the left?

What does the file look like with less? All of the jazzy stuff with org mode is done the the org-mode major mode in emacs and is not "in the file". You could also switch off org-mode in emacs with M-x org-mode.

> What does the file look like with less? That's what I should have done. Unfortunately, I no longer have that version of the file. Unless indicated otherwise, I'll assume that I was mistaken, that I was only looking at a buffer with highlighting, and that I had not killed-and-reloaded a file with highlighting.