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Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

I don't have much use for this one in particular, but poked around and found another of his apps called Pure Paste. I've been looking for something like it for a long time.

It clears formatting from copy, so you can paste in clear text. Shift+cmd+v doesn't work everywhere, and the countless apps and scripts I've tried are flaky, but this seems to work!

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> paste in clear text. Shift+cmd+v doesn't work everywhere

On macOS, I am unaware of Shift-Command-V as an OS-enabled shortcut. Perhaps that shortcut is part of third-party software or older versions of macOS?

To paste while matching the style of the focused document (including no style at all), I use

> Option-Shift-Command-V: Paste and Match Style: Apply the style of the surrounding content to the item pasted within that content. [0]

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Option-Shift-Command-V is such an uncomfortable keyboard command. I wish I could rebind plain Command-V itself to paste without style always.

You can do this with Karabiner-Elements, but as noted this doesn't work everywhere — IIRC, it doesn't work in apps that don't have a "Paste and Match Style" menu item. Pure Paste solves this, as does Paste Plain Text.

If you use Raycast (highly recommended), you can also use its Paste As Plain Text extension: https://www.raycast.com/koinzhang/paste-as-plain-text

You don’t need any extra software to do this. You can reassign `⌘-V` to `Paste and Match Style` by running this in the terminal:

defaults write -g NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add 'Paste and Match Style' '@v';

I’ve been using this for years, and it works perfectly in most programs. If an app doesn’t have a `Paste and Match Style` option, its regular `Paste` command continues using `⌘-V`. But occasionally I want to paste an image and can’t because the `Paste and Match Style` command doesn’t work with non-text clipboard items.

In Windows I just pin the notepad in the 2nd position of my task bar and to achieve the process you did in Mac, it can be done with Ctrl+C, Windows+2, Ctrl+V.

Easier ways to accomplish this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10....

I use the Run window for this same thing

I used to use the URL bar to clear formatting from copy and paste. Copy, paste to URL bar, copy and then paste to destination.

Line Spacing goes away in this method for multiple sentences. This method is good for 1 word / 1 line.

I paste in the url bar and copy again as clear text.

That's unfortunately not working on firefox. There is that text input field looking thingy on my screen, and it tempts me every time, and it punches me in the face every time as it copies the original URL instead of my text (on both linux, windows).

But recently I added the search bar next to the url bar for this very reason. I don't remember using it yet.

That also loses line breaks, as well as requiring significantly more steps for a single copy-paste.

Wow. Great. I have a txt file on my desktop only for that.

I paste the text there and then copy it again.

For Windows there’s PureText: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

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