Paste without formatting on macOS | Hacker News Reader

Paste without formatting on macOS

scottswezey.com

213 pointselisaado149 comments

My whole life I've been wishing for something in between.

If I'm transferring between applications, I never want 95% of formatting — I don't want font or size or color or line-height or paragraph spacing or whatever.

But I do want italics, because that conveys actual meaning around emphasized words and titles. And I do want to preserve subscript/superscript in things like CO2 or "squared", because that's similarly meaningful. And I also want to maintain bulleted and numbered lists, which again have meaning. Strikethru as well.

So I just really wish that the OS had a toggle switch so that "Paste and Match Style" would still preserve everything "textually meaningful" -- <i>, <sub>, <sup>, <ol>, <ul>, <li>, and <s>.

I recently bought the Pastebot, it's one of those tools once you try it and make it fit in your workflow you never want to go back.

It's something like 12$ one time purchase which is great and a huge productivity booster!

https://tapbots.com/pastebot/

Notational Velocity works exactly this way.

You could argue that font, size, colour, line-height and paragraph spacing should not be considered "formatting" of the text, but as properties that belong to the container that the text is in.

Whether it belongs to text or the pdf reader or rich text editor or browser doesn't matter.

I want to carry them over when I copy and paste the text (and sometimes to strip them). I don't want to copy and paste the container.

I agree completely—but I'll go further. From a UI standpoint, italics should be treated akin to capital/lowercase letters.

Currently, on every computer I'm aware of, if I copy an all-caps paragraph and paste into the middle of an all-lowercase paragraph, the pasted text will still be capitalized. Similarly, if I click into an all-caps paragraph and start typing without caps-lock on, the new text will be lowercase.

Italics should work the same way.

Note: I am aware that capitals, unlike italics, are different characters in Unicode/ASCII. Put that aside for a moment, it's not relevant to UI behavior, users don't care.

In CSS, `text-transform: uppercase;` is able to separate case from styling. I've used it frequently in the past, since you often want to experiment with all-caps for short headings, captions, subtitles, etc. Whereas if you hard-code the all-caps in text, you can't go back.

In Chrome, if you copy CSS-all-caps text to the clipboard, it is copied as uppercase.

Intriguingly, in Firefox, it is copied as the original (mixed case) source HTML text.

I do like the idea treating all-caps as a style, just like small caps. The problem, of course, is that it makes it kind of impossible to type within it, since there's no feedback as to when you're typing capital letters at the starts of sentences or not.

To be clear, my assertion is that most user-facing text editors should have the opposite of all-caps as a style! I think italics should be treated the way we treat capitalization.

Pressing ⌘I (or using the UI equivalent) should act like the italics version of caps lock.

I much prefer the approach of applying emphasis, be it italics, bold, all-caps etc, on top of plain text. To me this is the most versatile approach and I think is better for accessibility.

A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis. Where the same isn't true of capitalisation.

> A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis.

But it doesn't, that's the thing! The word you italicize can alter the meaning of a sentence. For instance:

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

> "I didn't steal Sally's necklace!"

One of my favorites:

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

I didn’t say I took the money.

As of this writing my parent comment is downvoted, so maybe the difference between the three sentences is less obvious than I thought. While all three sentences assert that I didn't steal Sally's necklace:

• The first version implies that I acquired Sally's necklace via other means.

• The second version implies that I stole someone else's necklace.

• The last version implies that I stole something else from Sally.

> A sentence with italics or any other emphasis should read exactly the same without that emphasis.

Not true. In conventional English, it is typical (if not expected) to add verbal emphasis to italicized words while reading aloud.

What makes italics so special it deserves that treatment and not everything else in rich-text (bold, underline, sub/superscript)?

The fact that it is special? All of this is arbitrary, that doesn't make it wrong.

Italics is the most important of those styling options for formal English writing (eg MLA style). Underlining was traditionally used a as substitute if italics were unavailable.

Subscripts and superscripts should probably work the same way as italics. They're just not as top of mind for me because I don't use them as often in my day-to-day life (and when I do, I often use the unicode characters).

I could see an argument for treating bold and underline this way as well, but I think the case is less clear-cut. Boldness is more likely than italics to be used for visual styling as opposed to semantic meaning.

Yup, bold is mostly used stylistically for headings, titles, stuff like that. (And sometimes as part of link styling, especially with a lighter link color.)

Virtually the only time it's used within text is in a textbook-type situation, where the first use of key terms is in bold, but subsequent usage isn't. Which isn't helpful/relevant if you're copying a passage from it -- just because it was the first usage in that book, doesn't mean it's the first usage in your own document.

And underlining doesn't really exist typographically except for links. It's always been the handwriting/typewriter substitute for italics. It has no established meaning whatsoever -- any non-link usage of it is idiosyncratic, which is usually not something you'd want to preserve.

I wrote a browser extension some time ago that does something similar: Paste as Markdown [0].

The user can copy any text from anywhere, and then with the help of the extension, paste the result (somewhere in the browser), in markdown, so emphasis and lists, etc. are preserved, while everything else is discarded.

[0] https://markitdown.medusis.com/

I kind of want something like markdown or WP reveal codes, where you can copy paste formatted text, but be able to see the formatting so you can remove anything unnecessary.

There's countless implementations of formatting toolbars for web based editors, most of them bad, I feel like if operating systems handled this for users we wouldn't be wasting cycles on this kind of problem.

This gets me most of the way there:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/copycat/jdjbiojkkl...

I've never wanted to maintain formatting while pasting. This is probably one of the most annoying default behaviors I've ever encountered.

That and "drag selected text to random location". Who selects and drags blocks of code?

I do.

Are you talking about how code pasted in is never indented the way it originally was? It somehow adopts the indentation of the above line? I despise that.

I don’t think they were talking about that. But since you mentioned it, if you (or anyone else bothered by this) use VSCode, you can often just undo (first time undoes auto-indent if it was performed, second undoes paste). Sure it’s annoying, but at least for me it’s become so automatic I hardly notice it anymore.

I just learned this was possible the other day and I've been using it all the time since

Seriously, when that rolled out decades ago it was one of the dumbest things and still gets me. I always want to start a selection on the text. Dragging the text somewhere else never does what I want it to and I end up having to copy/paste anyway

And yet lists of things often allow dragging of individual items to rearrange them. I wonder if thinking of paragraphs of text, and perhaps even sentences, in a similar way might make the dragging of text feature more appealing (I also dislike it).

Yeah, if it was code blocks, I still wouldn’t use it but it wouldn’t seem ludicrous.

Many computer users have a hard time with invisible concepts. Copy and Cur put text away in some invisible buffer that some people don’t get, so dragging text works better for them.

I would love a way to disable drag and drop behavior globally. I absolutely never want to use it, but it's easy to accidentally trigger it.

I do this in nvim. After making a visual selection I hold alt/option/meta and use j+k to move it up and down as a block. It's been helpful a few times when reorganizing things as I write them.

I do use it occasionally but quite often if I’ve put text into the wrong field of a form. On Mac I quite often make text clippings by dragging text to the desktop

When I'm using my browser, I select and drag text from the page to the tabs section of the browser window to open a new tab which queries my search engine using the text (unless the text was a URL, in which case the new tab goes to the URL). I could copy, open a new tab, paste, and press enter in some cases, but that opens a tab to the right of all other tabs, when sometimes I want my new search tab to be in a different position.

However, I would appreciate a setting that would let me arbitrarily switch between dragging vs reselecting already selected text.

Me, all the time, but mostly across applications and not within single documents.

Sometimes because I want to keep what’s in my clipboard already; other times because it’s sensitive enough data that I don’t necessarily trust all running applications with (the threat primarily being an application incidentally logging/persisting it as part of some “helpful” feature, not outright malware).

I mean, I always do within the same app. If I've moving a section of a document in Word from one place to another, you can be sure I want to preserve everything.

However, I agree with you a billion percent between apps. I'm sure I've copied text from a webpage into a document 10,000 times, and not a single time have I ever wanted the font or size or color preserved.

Just think it's an important distinction to preserve.

Also I can't be the only person who almost never copies in an editor, but cuts and pastes back into place (so I can visually verify the copy.) It would be very frustrating if ctrl or cmd +X, V didn't restore the document to its original state.

I've never heard of that. Why do you do that? What's to verify? When has a copy ever gone wrong? I feel like I'm missing something because I don't understand it at all.

I do that too, I'm not sure why, but I'd guess it has something to do with the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it. I would guess that is just my way of checking that the clipboard is working like I assumed it would, because the behavior of copying and pasting isn't always consistent between different text boxes. More than anything, it's just a habit.

> the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it

I will say, sometimes I do find myself wondering whether something was copied as plain text or as formatted text, or whether I pasted the previous thing before going to copy another.

I really like what Apple has done with screenshots — a thumbnail hovers in a pop-up window in the corner of the screen for a bit. Doing something similar with the clipboard might not be the worst idea — after cut/copy, a thumbnail hovers in the corner until you paste, or until 15s have passed.

The fact that "copy" results in zero visual confirmation whatsoever does seem to be a bit of a violation of standard UX guidelines. Heck, even a visual effect like a flash and quick zoom-fade-out of the copied content feels like it would be helpful.

Realistically despite decades of doing this, I'd get over it pretty quickly. I think I just like to see that I pressed the correct keys.

I do think in the early days (for me, this is the 90s) I had failures that weren't fat-fingering, the keypress just not registering. Maybe the wrong window has had focus once or twice too in some weird scenarios.

> What's to verify?

That your keypress registered. You held down the modifier and you think you hit "C", but did you actually? For unfathomable reasons, when you copy text, there's no visual or other confirmation that anything has happened.

If it takes you a long time to navigate to where you want to paste (scroll a lot in an editor, juggle windows, etc.), it's a bummer to get there and learn that your clipboard doesn't have the text on. You have to make another round trip.

I’ve had copy fail for whatever reason (maybe a bug, maybe I didn’t press C all the way) and then pasted into a terminal window. Nothing bad has happened, but it certainly could have.

While I don’t paste in place of my copy, I do use Cmd+Ctrl+V to paste in Terminal (which escapes all “special” characters with a backslash) to avoid trouble.

Many editors these days support granular versioning. Isn’t it pretty annoying to have lots of remove/add back steps in that version history?

It seems like it'd be saner to have Copy, and Copy and Preserve Formatting. But I guess the Copy, Alt-Tab, Paste, ah what the fuck!, Undo, Paste without Formatting spares a few steps.

To counter your first use case, if I'm copy-pasting the second word (say it's a complicated name) of a heading to reuse in a paragraph, I don't want that paragraph to be another heading. In another universe, the geniuses who coded the editor realized that "no one will ever want a word in the middle of the paragraph to be in a different font, in a different color and with a different background color because they copied it like that from a website with that formatting".

Yes! This should be the default with Cmd-Shift-V being the alternative that preserves style.

I disagree, but only because to me, cmd/ctrl-shift-V is "unformatted paste".

I wonder if there's a good reason why this is the default, or if it's a case of some engineer in the 80's simply choosing one over the other

When first introduced, ctrl-c was the TERM signal to exit a program. Microsoft didn't give one rats ass about POSIX conventions at the time—especially in a GUI—so "c" was an easy pneumonic for "copy". "V" just happened to be the character right next to it, so that was paste. (Also because "p" was for "print".)

ctrl-v was pretty basic, because the all the apps were basic. Most text was basically unformatted (Notepad) or moving from one part of a document to another (Word). Then companies introduced the notion of grabbing metadata along with text, so that you didn't have to figure out what font, size, and color were being applied every time. Then copy/paste was applied to non-text like image parts, files in a directory, etc. You could copy graphs from Excel and put them in your PowerPoint slideshow.

Then folks found out they didn't necessarily want all that metadata along with their content, so shift-ctrl-v was introduced. Somewhere along the way, patterns emerged for many folks (like myself) where matching the target formatting was the more common case. This is especially true among coders.

It's too late to change the default for everyone, but this tweak allows for some of us to tailor the behavior more closely to our own personal workflows.

Why don't you just use the already built-in shortcut shift+opt+cmd+v that paste as plain text?

I do this quite often. But it's really not easy to do.

Because that's an awful shortcut

Is that even a shortcut? I would have a hard time remembering that, compared to cmd + v.

What I use is paste into my browser's URL bar and copy from there.

I’m not the only one!

This or a textedit window that is set to plaintext

I've doing Menu | Edit | Paste and Match Style like I guess you're supposed to do?

Please be aware that this submits it to your search engine, so if you cleaning up passwords, etc this way you are essentially leaking them.

I turn that off when I first setup my browser.

I wouldn’t be so sure it doesn’t get logged anyway, at least locally.

The combination of Ctrl+C - Ctrl+T - Ctrl+V - Ctrl+A - Ctrl+X - Ctrl+W is pretty much hardcoded into my brain.

This is a tiny bit more hardcore because it also trims any whitespace from the beginning and end of the string, and it strips out all newline chars. It's very handy quite often, though.

On iOS, I find it nearly impossible to work with the URL bar. It is faster and less frustrating to simply pull out my laptop.

This solution seems to only work in certain places. For example, it's not working in MS Word. Also, why is it "shift command V" in some places and "shift option command V" in others?

Because some applications like MS Word blatantly don't follow Apple design guidelines and it annoys me to no end.

MS Office doesn't even follow MS Office norms across MS Office applications. Ctrl-Shift-V only works in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It isn't in Outlook and OneNote.

People seem to be under the impression that Ctrl-Shift-V is a Windows feature, when in reality it is part of three specific applications and then the wild-west everywhere else.

My point being: I'm unsurprised MS gets the MacOS norms wrong when they cannot even get it right on Windows.

The overall Windows ecosystem is so inconsistent that I have trouble faulting any individual application for not following "norms", because they can barely even be called norms.

(Don't get me wrong, macOS is slowly getting there too, it gets worse every year.)

So I solved this issue using a brute force manner a few years ago using aText (but any text substitution software should work, including Keyboard Maestro).

When I type the characters 'zv' it substitutes for the clipboard. This gets around any smartness with formatted text and apps trying to be clever. I also chose zv because the substring is unlikely to appear naturally when being typed anywhere. (I prefix most of my substitutions with jj but wanted as few characters for this as possible).

I also use Keyboard Maestro to get around apps and websites that block pasting (like password validation fields).

Macros:

- type from clipboard: instead of pasting, it simulates each character as a keystroke

- insert then type: same thing but shows a text input window

- insert then type (50ms/200ms): same thing, but also simulates latency in case certain apps can't handle unthrottled keyboard input (found this when typing into remote terminals sometimes for whatever reason)

Also check out Pasteboard Viewer.app to see what the MacOS pasteboard actually contains (it can contain text and formatted text and images and lets the app choose what to paste, which can be very confusing).

Amazes me how many hacks like this are required just to use a computer the way I want.

> This solution seems to only work in certain places. For example, it's not working in MS Word

Firstly, the menu item is “Paste and Match Formatting” in Word, not “Paste and Match Style”, so you’d have to tweak that separately.

Word also has quite a few settings for copy/paste behavior that will affect what it does (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/control-the-forma...).

I think those vary by version. For example, Word for Mac 2019 has “Merge formatting when pasting from PowerPoint” and “Adjust formatting when pasting from Excel” checkboxes. Don’t ask me what the difference between “Merge” and “Adjust” is.

> Also, why is it "shift command V" in some places and "shift option command V" in others?

It’s a relatively late addition to ‘standard’ commands. I guess the search for an unused combo that’s reasonably logical led to different results in different applications.

I guess Apple went for option-shift-command-V (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236) because it’s fairly complex, and less likely to be already taken.

I encountered this recently. I tried what was suggested in the link and it didn’t work when I pasted into my browser (pasting into Protonmail). The core ”issue” is the copy action puts the formatted version into the pasteboard (as well as the plain version) and the app can choose to retain the formatting if it likes and not all apps even offer two menu items to give you the choice.

You can add an entry for the each app if necessary. It's not ideal but it works.

It’s amazing to me how Apple got this basic setting so wrong. It would be interesting to see the decision process that was used and if it was decided correctly maybe overridden by an individual?

I don’t know how it works on macOS, but on Windows copying to the clipboard can provide content in multiple formats (like multiple MIME types) at the same time, for example simultaneously as rich text and as plain text. The receiving application then decides which format it understands and selects for pasting. If both sides understand rich text, this results in rich text being transferred. (It basically works like HTTP content negotiation.) You have to artificially add a man-in-the-middle to force a different format.

This is exactly how it works on macOS too. And that’s actually the mechanism used by “paste and match style” AIUI.

It’s that way in Windows and windows apps too.

I do find myself still annoyed with Apple's persistence towards doing things different, just be different.

Why can't I just have a navigation bar in the finder window that I can manually add in.

Why do I have to google a keyboard combination just so I can view hidden files and folders.

So many little things but they can add up. And it's not a Microsoft v Apple thing. Unix distros dont have a special 'command' button just for them to confuse things.

It's not obvious, but finder allows you to put scripts, apps and shortcuts in the toolbar.

https://osxdaily.com/2023/05/25/how-to-add-apps-to-macos-fin...

You can create a shortcut (or applescript) that does the things you mention.

In 1984, easily transferring styled text between applications was a novelty.

Apple also aimed for simplicity, and when copying between MacWrite and MacPaint (the only two applications everybody had), keeping formatting was the best option.

Add a few decades of people getting used to that behavior, and changing it takes guts, and will upset quite a few users who know how to repair formatting after pasting, but won’t easily learn about the new keyboard combination.

I also am not sure stripping formatting by default is the best choice today. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38142074, who wants something in-between.

Maybe, paste should keep only formatting of entire units being pasted? So, it would keep bold, italic, etc, but only keep line height, margins, etc. for entire paragraphs being pasted? I can see people getting highly confused about that, too, though, especially about the difference between selecting all characters in a paragraph and also selecting the paragraph boundaries.

Option-Shift-Command-V does the same: Paste and Match Style

And then you go to the hospital to fix your broken fingers from this atrocious key combination

Funny how it feels entirely normal now that's burned into my muscle memory, so much so that I try to use it on Windows boxen, sometimes to weird effect.

Any way to change that to Shift Command V? For some reason the blog post solution doesn't work on Notion.

Remap with Karabiner (https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/). I personally mapped right_command + v to it, but it's capable of a straight out remap.

Never in the history of copy and paste has someone though man I wish I retained that 78pt blue highlight font when I pasted this line of text into my document

I was missing this on Windows, then discovered that similar functionality can be added via PowerToys: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/paste-as...

PowerToys is a mandatory install for me on all Windows machines. Highly recommend!

Right, it’s in Powertoys, and alternatively this works well: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

I set up a Keyboard Maestro macro to strip the rich text markup from the clipboard and paste. It's built around this one-liner: `pbpaste | textutil -convert txt -stdin -stdout -encoding 4 | pbcopy` which obviates the need to hook into the "Paste and Match Style" menu item which may or may not exist.

I’m using maccy.app on macOS which is awesome and does just that. This should be a default feature of macOS for productivity.

Thanks for sharing. It’s nice to see thorough docs and tests https://github.com/p0deje/Maccy

Pasting with formatting is one of the rare UX things that Apple gets so damn wrong.

Unbelievable how frustrating it is, almost on par with autocorrect correcting the same word twice after I typed it out twice.

I mean for ducks - I mean ducks, no ducks sake…

Pasting with formatting seems to be the default in Windows / windows apps too last I used it.

Yeah this is not a Mac-only thing.

Yes, I keep Notepad open just to bounce copy/paste off of to strip formatting.

Yup, and whether paste without formatting is ctrl-shift-v, ctrl-alt-v, or not available varies app by app. It's infuriating.

That's why I uses Ditto Clipboard Manager in Windows. I have it set to use paste without formatting (paste in plain text) as default.

I recalled Windows can do it by using Ctrl+Shift+V which paste without formatting. Just a extra key to make it happen.

Also the nondeterministic and possibly causality-violating behavior of capitalization during typing, autocorrect, and backspacing.

Once autocorrect decides a word is capitalized, the keyboard will always do exactly the wrong thing when you try to fix it. You’ll backspace to the first letter, and the shift key will highlight so you capitalize some non-capital word. Or, having been burned by this, you’ll tap shift to turn that off, but it guessed you would do that, so you’re still capitalizing. And if autocorrect changed a name to a common word, good luck capitalizing the name.

There is a PhD, and possibly a new branch of physics, to be had here.

Tell me that it's possible to disable autocorrect, isn't it?

Yes you can. [1]

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mchlp2299/mac

Neat, but the whole interface for managing keyboard shortcuts is pretty terrible in macOS. Either they really don't want you to mess with it, or it's just really hard to design for.

Don't give them any ideas. It's a leftover from a bygone era when people at Apple cared about people using their computers.

I actually think it's quite brilliant? One of the best things still in macOS.

Wait until you find out about the _other_ hidden mechanism to configure keyboard shortcuts that can send arbitrary objective-c selectors.

I have a different opinion. I try to be familiar with the Defaults and preferably stay with Native Apps to get things done. Once you are comfortable with the Default, you layer your expertise and experience on top of it.

So, when I set up or re-set up the OS and the app, I try to see if I can live with the Defaults as much as possible. However, I spend quality time learning the details, so I’m not just jumping to a different App that does it better.

Example. I’ve been using Apple’s Default Mail App and have tried a lot of other Mail clients. Some are awesome; some are fantastic. I learned all the shortcuts and tricks to make it sing to any tune I wanted. My Apple Mail does not have toolbars or anything else except the message list and the message[1]. It’s a similar setup for many other default Apps.

I did love Fantastical, SuperHuman, etc. I might even use them, but that would be to separate an entity (say, work) but not for the Default Me. I love the idea of using any computer/device/system easily instead of one perfectly.

So, for the copy-paste without formatting. I suggest letting the Default be. I know the shortcuts sideways, and my muscle memory kicks in to do the correct one. I love Obsidian pasting it as Markdown when I copied HTML, but my fingers do the right job for pasting in the un-styled format in Apple Notes.

1. https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-apple-macos-mail-...

I'll just leave this here:

https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste

PSA if you use Alfred (w. Powerpack) you can get a always working version of this, but not bound to Cmd+V. It's a bit annoying to set up though

> If you go to the Workflows tab, click the [+] in the bottom left, under Templates > Clipboard > you'll find a "Paste as plain text from clipboard" workflow. Add your own hotkey, and you'll be able to do exactly what you need https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10032-clipboard-hotkey-tha...

There is a multitude other tools recommended in this thread also. The one thing I would recommend for those who does not have any clipboard tool is don't just get something that does plaintext. Get something that does HISTORY and plaintext conversion.

Clipboard History/Search is among my top 10 productivity enhancements hacks that anyone can do and benefit from, might even be the nr 1.

Whoever championed it at Microsoft and managed to get it included by default in Windows 10 (Press Win+V) deserves a medal.

i have always pasted into the url/searchbar of firefox and select all and copy out of that for the same effect.

I have a present for you then: https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste

Where have you been all my life?

I felt the same way when I found it :) His other stuff is worth checking out too

OMG! This guy also made Command X. Apple makes things so much harder because they think they are making it easier for grandma.

Both Mac OS and Windows started with a mostly single-app interaction model. Switching between applications was slow and clumsy so it wasn’t something that you did frequently.

Within an app, copy and paste with styling makes sense as you are trying to reproduce chunks of text.

Easy multi-tasking only came later after default were established.

I have been using [Jumpcut](https://github.com/snark/jumpcut) for this purpose. I have it bound to ctrl cmd v, so it doesn't conflict with the normal cmd v

I believe cmd + shift - v also pastes without formatting and I've always used that. I didn't know you could change cmd - v to do that so I will be doing this.

The consensus seems to be: - Cmd-v should paste to match formatting everywhere. No one wants that formatting or if they do they are in a tiny minority that can be served with some new shortcut. - there are several more or less cheesy ways to fix this in more or less places

So Apple, retire it with the silly touch bar, push really hard click, and the lightning connector. Maybe these devs would be happer making touch text editing more than awful.

The “push really hard click” is one of the things that makes the apple track pad feel so great. It is a tactile feeling that is not easy to do by accident.

The touchbar would have been cool if it was a rock solid implementation that never bugged out.

And yeah, lighting can’t die fast enough.

On linux X11 this is done with "targets". So essentially your browser, or any app, exposes a few different varieties of the same content e.g text/html as well as text/plain. If the app you paste into, requests text/plain, then you will get it without formatting.

In fact even file copying is done this way, it copies the list of filenames as type application/file-list or something of the sort.

I spend many happy hours copying, changing, and pasting text to Ms Word documents on Windows. Eventually, I am using the middle mouse button to paste without format, and ctrl-v to paste with format. (Using X-mouse button control) Power toys has a setting that says it pastes as text too, but if I ask it to use ctrl-v, it gives me an warning saying that there may be issues if I want to paste a picture.

I don’t recall paste w/ formatting ever working well. IMHO, the OS’s should allow for some global config for default for Ctrl-v, Ctrl-shift-v.

It was a very long time since I trained my mind on automatically pasting what I copy into sublime text and then it from there so that I don't get formatting preserved. I do this for anything more than two words/ not numbers. I don't even know which was the offender (windows or mac).

Not to mention the mess that is pasting between Notion, Slack and Gsuite. Especially between the first two.

I really like https://github.com/mattDavo/Yippy for 'managing' my copy-pasting. It has an option to not paste as rich text.

In iOS I hate that Messages pastes in links from Wikipedia. To get around this, I first paste into an app that doesn’t preserve the links, such as a Web panel or WhatsApp.

Doesn't cmd + shift + v do this everywhere and across different OS?

But while we're at, "smart quotes" should be nuked, or at least default to off.

Why do this when you can have both options?

- Cmd-V: with styling

- Cmd-Shift-V: without styling

Except for all the apps where it's "command shift option V" which is like trying to deliver a Vulcan nerve pinch.

Because Cmd-V should be "without styling" since that's the non-landmine option that is almost always what you want.

Or you could try Karabiner to paste without formatting with a more convenient double tap

Cmd-v paste

Cmd-v-v paste no format

Maybe some day proper keybinding support will come to the OS default GUIs

I've been using TextExpander for this behaviour for a long time. I remapped my "§" (ISO-PT keyboard) key to paste as simple text.

This is great! I'd love the same for iOS.

Does anyone have a handy defaults write command to do this from the terminal

No, but for me this is better :) https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste

I use shift+command+v, sometimes I want to paste with formatting

Shift + Option + Command + V is the Mac shortcut for this.

Oh my god yes! Who TF even invented paste with formatting?!

Just use cmd-shift-v?

On iMessage, this causes images to be pasted twice

This, and I'd like links to be preserved.

On X11:

   xsel -o -b | xsel -i -b

The futility of apple features you can't control.

The only case where this is annoying is in applications like Keynote, where pasting individual elements without style is not what you want. Infuriating stuff either way.

You can add a separate App Shortcut for Keynote, where ⌘V is set to Paste. App Shortcuts override global shortcuts.

I love the Mac keyboard shortcut system. It's so brilliantly flexible.

How to copy paste image?

Is this why it’s so annoying to copy and paste in the terminal on Mac?

No, terminal doesn’t use text styling.

What problems are you seeing with terminal? Copy/Paste work fine for me.

This is the rare case of Microsoft Word behavior leaking into macOS with predictably terrible results.

No, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38142158 for the bigger picture.

And Microsoft Word actually provides menus both before and after pasting allowing to choose how the styling of the pasted content should be handled.

MacWrite on the Macintosh in the mid-1980s supported copying [some] format information like bold/italics. Word did introduce more complex format information (RTF) in the early 1990s but both Microsoft and Apple advanced this area with arguably Apple themselves originating it.

Still trying to understand why even the unformatted text option in Word often doesn't produce unformatted text — I've seen too many times where column & margin information carries along even when font styling does not, & there's no good way to get rid of it without starting an entirely new Word document.

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