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Comment by bombledmonk | Hacker News Reader

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work.

Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how.

https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

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> In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v.

Sometimes that trick just stops working for no reason at all, then there's nothing else for it but to paste into notepad.exe and re-copy.

Just to kind of address the Outlook issue, you can also set the default paste setting to be text only. (sigh) we have to do this.

This is one of my many peeves with Outlooks UX. You can do Ctrl+Alt+V, which gives you an option to paste unformatted, but it's much more finger-intensive than the other shortcut.

This is one of those rare times that you can trace it directly to Bill Gates. Another one is Ctrl+F as send and not find (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...)

You have to consider the average user though. They have an image and 4 fonts in their signature, one of which is Comic Sans

I’d say it’s all backwards default copy-paste should be just text and then you can go overboard with adding +shift to combination or +alt

On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.

Thanks so much for this - I can't imagine how much time I have wasted jumping through goofy hoops trying to change the formatting in gmail.

If only there was a way to set this as the default and format pasting as the shift setting.

FWIW, shift+command+v works for me...

> If only there was a way to set this as the default and format pasting as the shift setting.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...

(MS Office requires a slightly different procedure: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/287159/is-there-a-...)

I used to paste to use the URL bar to paste without formatting and copy again. This is a game changer.

hah you're right, I don't know why I had that option in there, maybe snuck into my muscle memory from something else.

maybe it was in one of the older macs I had to use recently, or some combination with voiceover that I was running.

I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.

It's optional

Option was required in every app I've ever tried this in... do you somehow have different keybindings than me?

I just tried in Gmail and cmd-shift-v worked.

I do command-shift-v all the time too and it works. Course maybe the places where it doesn't seem to work are the ones that require "option" too... hmm...

Chrome does not use the system-wide key shortcut but defines their own.

Except Chrome, which is often where people are using gmail.

Maybe it is related to the language of the keyboard.

That's a lot of finger gymnastics, but it's probably better than `pbpaste|pbcopy`, which is how I've been doing it all these years.

Not if you assign it a hotkey in Keyboard Maestro :)

On my MacBook Pro, Command + Option + V universally executes the following AppleScript:

  use scripting additions
  do shell script "pbpaste | pbcopy"
  return

Thank you! I will now use pbpaste|pbcopy

That's guitar barre chord level difficulty

I wish MSTeams supported ancient well established UI/UX conventions, this one most of all.

It's incredibly annoying in Outlook. Every other Microsoft product I've used like Word supports the key-combo, but of course Outlook has to be different.

In word, Cntrl Shift V just applies formatting. You have to Ctrl V wait hit Cntrl again and then hit T.

And then there's Excel, where you need to do the same but it's Control + V instead of Control + T.

In Excel you can press F2 before pasting. That takes focus of the cell one level deeper to the input-box, where only plain text is allowed.

Yes, but you can make it work as described by changing a setting in Word.

My company switched to Office over Google and this is by far the worst thing I've come across, and that's saying a lot.

Fucking Microsoft. Why can't things be simple and standardized?

Like the reason ctrl+f in Outlook is to "forward", rather than "find".

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=50...

I've made this "mistake" more times than I'd be willing to admit.

backwards compatibility.

people who have been using those applications for decades do not want those shortcuts to change for any reason.

Haha, I wish they'd thought of that before they implemented the ribbon to replace the menu bar. I can't imagine how many hours of productivity were lost for people dealing with that change.

they did think of that...

you'll be happy to know that a lot of the ribbon is going away in favor of small buttons with icons on them, and people are losing their minds over it. so no matter what Microsoft do, millions of people are gonna bitch about it and complain for years and years.

Any way is to paste inside a non-textrich area like the browser address bar and then immediately copy the content again to get rid of the styling.

I do this all the time. Cmd+tab into browser, cmd+t, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+w, cmd+tab to where I need to paste, cmd+v

But now that I've seen you can add shift to remove formatting, I'll have to try to remember to do that instead.

I also do this sometimes: cmd+tab, cmd+l, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+z, cmd+tab

Fewer pages blinking away

Oh wow I had always gotten into the habit of copying into a simple text editor first if I wanted to strip out the formatting.

I often copy to Notepad on Windows, but careful, some characters get silently dropped.

It's worse in the smartphone world, at least on iOS. There isn't any notion of paste-plain-text. If I want that, eg in Mail app, I have to use the app Plain Text. It feels like crap.

I hate outlook blocking that. No idea why you would implement that not working.

In Outlook, go to Options > Mail > Editor Options > Advanced > Cut, Copy, Paste > change the drop downs for the various scenarios to "Keep Text Only" to always strip formatting.

On Windows I like to use this: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

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