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Comment by qlm | Hacker News Reader

Can somebody explain why "paste with formatting" is so widely the default option? I have literally never wanted to paste with formatting and neither have multiple family members who have needed help with preventing it from happening.

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IMO if paste with formatting was assigned another shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+V and the default Ctrl+V was without formatting, that would be less frustrating.

If you sit someone who doesn't know How Links Work in front of some text with an inline hyperlink in it, then try to get them to copy it over to another place, you end up wanting to get to this default pretty quickly. "Right click copy link address" is real unintuitive. I've never wanted the text formatting itself to come over, bold text and headings and whatnot, but since that lives in about the same conceptual space, it's a casualty of design.

It would be pretty trivial to paste without formatting but still auto-parse links. Many apps do the link parsing on the client side, so it's not a formatting concern at all.

That's fine if the text you're copying spells out the URL, but often it will be just a word(s) that are hyperlinked, so if pasted as plain text the software you paste into has no idea there was a URL linked at all.

(But I too wish plain text pasting was the default more often.)

How would that work in the case where the link display text is not the address? Normally pasting without formatting discards the fact that some text like “download other file” is a link.

History. The Mac didn’t have “paste without formatting”, and assigned ⌘-V to “paste with formatting”.

Even if it had, they might have made it the default, either to show of that styles copied over, or for consistency. If you paste a picture, you don’t lose formatting, either (of the picture, whatever that means, or any text in the image)

If you copied some text in MacWrite, for example, exited MacWrote, launched MacPaint, and ⌘V-ed into MacPaint, you likely wanted to keep the font, size and style.

Some programs also have several variants of “without formatting”. Excel is a good example (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?

Last time I built something on MacOS, this was basically just a feature of the clipboard API that each app could use independently. When copying to the clipboard, you could declare numerous formats for what was copied, and any app receiving clipboard input could state that they only accepted one format.

e.g. copy a jpeg file and you can paste it into Slack, and it will automatically add the image to the post. Paste it into the terminal and you'll get the absolute path to the file. Those sound like sensible defaults that are essentially 'context sensitive paste'.

You could copy a link from a webpage and store both the HTML version and a raw-text version in the clipboard, probably a version that used an annotated string, too.

For the same reason, yeah... this isn't as intuitive when it comes to software like Excel.

That has been around on the Mac since 1984 and applications were always encouraged to put plain text on the clipboard alongside formatted text, but we’re talking UI here, not technology. This kind of UI allows you to choose which of these you want because it turns out the application cannot always make the best choice.

And yet macOS now has paste without formatting in almost every app I can think of (it’s enough that I’d guess it’s a standard thing apps get if they use native frameworks) AND it’s trivial to remap a menu item to another keyboard shortcut across the entire OS.

> Some programs also have several variants of “without formatting”. Excel is a good example (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?

Most of those are very specific versions of formatting or specialty features.

The only ones that would qualify as "paste without formatting" are "formulas" and "values" modes, and of those two I'd probably say "formulas" is a better default.

The normal case is when you’re cut/copy/pasting intra-app. Imagine if you formatted some text and then cut/paste to move it around and by default you lost your formatting.

Yep, this would be a good reason to keep it. You could probably get around this by using a separate MIME type for your app's content. If that type is present, use it, otherwise default to no formatting.

I'm not sure how intuitive that would be for users, though, having different defaults depending on where the data is coming from.

All I can figure is that research/observation showed that:

- Normal users often prefer to paste with formatting.

- Normal users will never figure out how to do that if it's not the default.

- Normal users will usually reluctantly accept paste-with-formatting even if it's not what they wanted—that is, it's only rarely entirely unacceptable for them.

- Power users will figure out how to paste without formatting.

You think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go ahead and add a little of each to all of them?

More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".

I imagine it stems from Powerpoint or Word. If I move bolded header text from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, it would be irritating to re-apply formatting. Once you have established this precedent, easy for it to infect the rest of the ecosystem.

I do actually use it all the time. We share some slack channels with external partners but email is the main mode for some others and I have to send code, interfaces, etc on occasion and copy pasting from VS Code maintains the formatting in Apple mail which I’ve found useful. No hitting the space at a hundred times to indent a nested line. And it’s easy enough to escape.

But that behaviour everywhere would drive me nuts.

I think they mean formatting as in slightly different font, color, background or goddamn underline and the like. I have never found it useful, and would be much much better with a non-default right click past as formatted option.

Your use case will not suffer since whitespace is text.

Formatting can hugely change the way text is read. It's quite common for the spacing between sections to be derived from the formatting. So removing the formatting can result in section headings with zero space from the preceeding paragraph but a manual newline between it and the next paragraph. Thus the headings essentially disappear into the preceeding text.

I've had countless other examples over the years where "paste without formatting" involved lots of manual editing of white space. Bullet and numbered lists sometimes vanish which rather matters if the text says "see point 3 above"

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