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Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

> "Copy a quote, image, or video from an app on one device and paste it into an app on another device."

Oh my I'm looking forward to this. How many silly workarounds (pastebins, email drafts, iMessages to self, Safari bookmarks) have we used to approximate this?

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While they're at it, can we make paste and match style the default? I can never remember the four key chord to do this and as a result send emails that look like ransom notes because of mismatched formatting.

I also find this frustrating. For applications where it happens frequently, you can map paste/paste-and-match to keystrokes you can remember using System Prefs > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. There isn't a global change you can make without 3rd party tools, AFAIK.

For frequently-used shortcuts that have hard-to-remember modifiers, I change them to the full set of shift-ctrl-opt-cmd so that just mashing my hand across the entire corner of the keyboard will get the job done. Has the nice side effect of (usually) avoiding the unexpected overwrite of other default app shortcuts.

Can't you put it under "All Applications" to have it take effect in all apps?

Yes, but it will break Cmd-V as "Paste" on apps that don't have a "Paste and Match Style" option. :(

My occasional workaround has been to paste in a text editor as plain text. I agree though, that the paste and match style should be default.

You can do the "paste into address bar and re-copy" dance. I'm getting pretty fast!

CMD-C CMD-T CMD-V CMD-A CMD-C CMD-W CMD-V

That's exactly what I do every time, and I became unnaturally quick in this insane dance.

I used to do this until I learned CMD-SHIFT-V which pastes without formatting so the text appears in whatever format the destination document uses

If you're using chrome, the omnibar seems to send out whatever you type to (google's?) server for search suggestion, so you shouldn't do that if you're copying sensitive data. You can use ⌘+shift+v to paste the text without formatting (and without sending your data to some random servers).

Just cmd+shift+v pastes without formatting ... which is often just whatever is in the target. The explicit 'with formatting' paste is hard to remember though.

I use Plain Clip (https://www.bluem.net/en/mac/plain-clip/) which is a tiny application which will remove formatting from text in clipboard. It's meant to be triggered from a hotkey / launcher app like Alfred or Spotlight. One plus is that you can set preferences to remove extra spacing or new lines.

You should check this out, I've been using and enjoying it for a while. My previous solution was sending emails to myself, so painful lol

https://www.pushbullet.com/

Pushbullet was developed more with Android in mind.

Having I iCloud access to your clipboard is scary ( unless it is encrypted E2E). Now your data, that was otherwise not meant to go to cloud, will endup being there.

I assume it will be backed by the same transport channel used for Handoff / Continuity, which is E2E-encrypted between devices and work on either wifi or bluetooth.

Do you have a source for that? According to this (not so definitive) source [1] it's peer to peer like the rest of the continuity features.

[1] http://www.idownloadblog.com/2016/06/23/macos-sierra-preview...

I dont know the exact implementation. But following article suggests that there is some lag due to data being exchanged with iCloud.

http://www.cnet.com/au/how-to/macos-sierras-universal-clipbo...

Agreed. "Copy Password to Clipboard", anyone? The thought of having that being transmitted unencrypted to a cloud server is not a nice one...

Pushbullet nails it. Bonus: it works with your non-Apple devices too!

I recall hacking together a something like this with automator,short cut key and an api call that would send my iPhone 3g/3gs a push notification or mms around 2008-2009. Moved off iPhone eventually.

Do you know if you have to be on the same wifi network for this to work, like with AirDrop?

You don't need to be on the same Wi-Fi network to use AirDrop.

It's backed by iCloud so I assume it would work across networks.

AirDrop doesn't require you to be on the same wifi network, or even for the devices to have internet access. I use it to toss files from my Macbook to my (completely offline) iPad regularly.

Great, I'm so looking forward to apple having access to all of my porn links.

If you're using iOS or Mac OS X/macOS then Apple already has access to far more than links you copy into the clipboard.

> How many silly workarounds have we used for this?

As a Linux and android user, I would have to say none. KDE Connect does this and is absolutely great.

It's a good feature and I'm not surprised that Apple copied it.

What does surprise me is how it's seemingly copied in a insecure way which includes cloud transfer, and not keeping it constrained to your LAN.

Oh well.

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