Show HN: I built a clipboard tool to strip/keep specific formatting like Italics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a clipboard tool to strip/keep specific formatting like Italics

custompaste.com

38 pointsEvaWorld914 comments

Hello HN,

I’m Joseph, a solo developer. I built CustomPaste because I was frustrated by the binary choice standard clipboard tools give us: either keep all the messy formatting (background colors, huge fonts) or strip everything down to plain text.

We all know Ctrl+Shift+V (paste as plain text), but that is often too destructive, it kills hyperlinks, bolding, and lists when I usually just want to normalize the font family (e.g., force Arial 11pt) or remove background colors.

I wanted a tool that let me "strip exactly what I want, and keep exactly what I want."

The Solution: Instead of a single "paste" behavior, the app lets you create reusable "Recipes" to define exactly how your text should land in your editor. It intercepts the clipboard, processes the structure locally, and transforms it based on your rules.

It offers granular control over:

    Smart Preservation: You can strip or set specific font families and sizes but specifically preserve bold, italics, and hyperlinks.

Structure: You can preserve tables while stripping the images inside them.

Data Cleanup: It can instantly purge duplicate lines, sort lists alphabetically, or flatten extra blank lines.

Text Fixes: It cleans up AI-generated artifacts (like "smart quotes" or em-dashes) and enforces casing (Title Case, Sentence Case).

Privacy & Pricing: The app runs 100% locally on your machine, no cloud processing and no data harvesting. It is a one-time purchase (lifetime license), not a subscription. There is a free trial (first 100 pastes) so you can test if it fits your workflow.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the "Recipe" approach or any other edge cases you struggle with when pasting text!

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I appreciate the polish for non-technical folks, but "clipboard formatter" feels like a feature, not a product. All of this can be done with AutoHotKey script for Windows and similar open-source tools for the other OS. And given how sensitive is clipboard data (passwords, keys, etc.) using a third-party app feels a bit uncomfortable.

You're absolutely right that you can script this if you have the know-how. I used AHK for years before building this.

But the main goal here is to offer that power to people who don't have the time or desire to learn scripting syntax, set up environments or debug code. They just want a tool that works out of the box. And even for technical folks, maintaining a script that parses complex HTML/RTF without breaking on nested tags (which often happens with Regex) is a headache I wanted to solve permanently.

Regarding privacy, that was actually my top priority when designing the architecture. I'm fully aware of how sensitive clipboard data is, which is why I built it to run 100% locally. You can literally block the app in your firewall or physically disconnect your internet and it works perfectly, I even built an offline license activation method specifically for high-security environments.

As a point of validation, I would use this even though I have know about AHK for years. I don’t have any interest in developing an AHK hobby and I value the specific single feature “strip non-bold/italic/underline/hyperlink formatting”. Thanks for making it :)

Thanks!

That exact feature, keeping the structure (bold/italic...) but stripping the junk was actually the hardest part to build. It requires parsing the full object tree recursively to make it compatible with any app, instead of just doing simple text replacements.

I saw so many people looking for that "middle ground" that I basically built the whole app around it. Glad it resonates!

You'll do better showing this to the people who would be your users. Looks like a solid idea to make some money on the side solving a problem you actually have.

A lot of people on HN wouldn't be your users. That's fine. Find them and post this there.

> AI-generated artifacts (like "smart quotes" or em-dashes)

I write from the keyboard using “smart quotes…” It’s so much more beautiful.

Smart quotes should work like ligatures rather than being special characters.

Totally agree for prose. The headache is that AI often generates code with those smart quotes, which causes immediate syntax errors in compilers.

That’s why I made it a toggleable rule: keep them for writing, but swap them automatically when you need valid code.

Wish this were built into the OS! Love the idea

The movies on the Features page don't play on Firefox: https://custompaste.com/#features

Love the idea, would be very interested in a version for MacOS

Thanks! Right now it's Windows only because it hooks deep into the system to handle the formatting and transformation properly, which is totally different on Mac.

However, a macOS version is the #1 request I get. It is definitely on the roadmap! If you want, you can drop your email in the form at the very bottom of the site (under "Don't Miss What's Next") and I'll notify you specifically when the MacOS version is ready.

Nitpick: It’s macOS, lowercase m.

I've been working on something super similar. https://github.com/paulirish/markpaste

There's now a CLI that'll read and update your (Mac) clipboard with the result. For this italic use case you'll have to edit the source but it won't be that bad.

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