Using the View Attributes dialog, you can turn on or off the display of the text itself or of text node decorations.

The Text view attribute controls the display of the text in text elements regardless of its relation to a text node.

The Text Node view attribute controls the display of the node numbers and their crosshairs, which can interfere with reading the text.

In order to distinguish fields from directly keyed text, fields display, by default, with a light gray background. To display fields without this background, turn on Hide Field Background in the Text category of the Preferences dialog ( File > Settings > User > Preferences ).