Copy/paste plain text should be the default | Hacker News Reader

Copy/paste plain text should be the default

rubenerd.com

40 pointsTomte21 comments

My personal favourite is when copy/paste gives radically different results based on whether you copy the text just before or just after sunset ... we can all agree on that at least?

* When I copy a full sentense with a bold word, I prefer to keep the formating.

* When I copy a single word, I prefer the word to get the formating of the pasting site.

The principle of minimal surprise says that we are doomed.

Might I suggest that you might like to keep the bold formatting, but not the font family, font size, line-height, margin, etc…

If I had to pickup one, I would much prefer plain text to be the default.

It is a very complex question. I'll note that after I paste formatted text into (say) Word, it's easy enough for me to change the font family globally while preserving the rest of the text. But that doesn't help if I need to change the font size.

My instincts want me to say that I want to preserve bold/italic/strikethrough and nothing else. I think my instincts are lying because as a human I want everything to be simple.

I'd like to think my response here is not catalogued adequately in his taxonomy of responses -- if you are strongly against pasting with formatting you probably are the sort of person who really should be using plain text formats such as markdown.

Virtually always when I'm using something which does WHYSIWYG formatting I almost always want the _convenience_ of pasting with formatting. I'm also entirely not in the mood, in that moment, to care that everything about the editing experience is tailored for the convenience and not detailed correctness (even though I'm grossed out by such tools).

I disagree. Pasting plain text removes additional attributes, an operation that forces the user to redo work (add highlighting, bold, font choice, etc). For average users who will never learn about special alternate ways to paste, they NEVER want to redo work. They will hate it. For those of us who care, we can always just paste into a plaintext editor if we want plaintext.

Defaults often become "the only available option" and in that case I (and I think most folks) would prefer the defaulting to "as much info as possible is preserved on paste".

Exactly. On a bigger scale, the time wasted by people redoing the formatting because it isn't pasted by default would outweigh that wasted by people writing blog posts about having to remove it.

And if they're that animated by it, they're are likely the sort of user that would look for a solution and change the default or learn how to paste in their software of choice without formatting.

I disagree with you.

I'd really hate to see the return of the days when copying and pasting from Microsoft Word into a web form would result in hundreds of kilobytes of pseudo-HTML garbage.

Just let me make: ctrl+v = traditional paste with formatting and all ctrl+shift+v = paste values no formatting

Yes, once I learned this was standard in browser/Electron I wanted it everywhere!

I was under the impression this was system wide in Windows and Mac at this point?

On the subject of copy pasting, does anyone else use the browser's address bar as a quick way to get rid of line breaks? Ideally, I would prefer a less janky way but I do it too infrequently to justify a dedicated program.

Back when I used Windows I used AutoHotKey to do things like stripping formatting, removing line breaks, or whatever I found myself wanting to do frequently. It’s an extra program, but not dedicated to that one feature, I had it doing all kinds of stuff over time.

HammerSpoon on macOS can likely do some similar stuff, but not as powerful, in my limited use of it.

I’m not sure if there is something similar for Linux, I assume so.

I just use the Run dialog (WindowsKey+R) to get a plain text box.

Run Dialog (WindowsKey+R), Paste (Ctrl+V), Select All (Ctrl+A), Copy (Ctrl+C), Cancel (ESC). Now clipboard has plain text.

I have a keyboard shortcut that opens my clipboard in neovim. Then, it's as simple as ggVGgJ:wq

Sounds useful, how did you set it up?

Cmd + Shift + V works in a large number of places.

It should be a global (OS or desktop environment) level option. I know that isn't possible for various reasons, and it's a shame.

I never want to copy formatting, ever.

> There are probably Dan Hon Response Cards for each of these.

The link to "Don Hon Response Cards" goes to a localhost address. O_o

But yes...Plain text should be default. If you're pasting a table, maybe present a dialog that says "Hey, looks like you pasted a table...did you want formatting, an unformatted table, or just the text?"

Totally agree. I keep TextEdit open on the side just so I can paste in there first then re-copy before pasting in the final destination.

just use CMD/CTRL+SHIFT+V to paste plain-text

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