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"Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard. Paste is command-V. A sensible application should do the most likely thing the user wants with paste and overload the shortcut for weird stuff. The fact that Microsoft consistently does the weird thing by default isn't a platform problem with the Mac, just with Word.

Now you could point out Pages has the same shortcut and same stupid behavior. I agree, but that's what happens when there's a clear market leader.

(Oddly enough, I've been implementing a web-based word processor, and we make paste-and-match (paragraph) style while retaining (character) styles the default. You can't actually do this in Word or Pages — default or not — despite the fact it's what users want 99% of the time. So if I paste some text with an italicized passage, the font changes to match the ambient styling, but the italics remain. When we implemented it, the UX people were flabbergasted -- they assumed it must be impossible because no word-processor does it.)

> "Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard.

If I copy and paste from a web browser, sometimes I want the formatting and sometimes I don't. It's not an usual case. Places where I use this shortcut include Word, Evernote and Mail. It's just not a sensible key combination.

>If I copy and paste from a web browser, sometimes I want the formatting

The default SHOULD be to lose the formatting of the original and to use the font/style that is in Word. I would think that 99% of time anyone is copying and pasting into Word this is their intended result.

I agree with the other post, it is incredibly stupid to have it keep formatting from the original by default.

Yes. This is a feature where you wonder if whoever though of that shortcut ever used a word processor. Such a bad design choice for such a common action.

"Paste and match formatting" shouldn't be necessary for most programs, and isn't a platform standard.

Yes, it is. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx... says "Table A-2 lists the system-reserved and commonly used keyboard shortcuts mentioned in the rest of this document."

Table A-2: contains ../art/ks_option_2x.png ../art/ks_shift_2x.png ../art/ks_command_2x.png V Apply the style of the surrounding text to the inserted object (equivalent to the Paste and Match Style command). See “The Edit Menu.” That links to https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx..., which describes the command, too.

I disagree with the claim that this is a bad choice, though. It may not be optimal if starting from a tabula rasa, but Apple did not do that when it introduced the combination, five years ago or so, in my memory. By that time Command-V has done styled paste for about 25 years, making it difficult to dethrone.

We must be glad that we have a standard for this, not angry that it may be a bit complex to type.

OK I didn't know Apple had made that a standard -- so I agree with the GP that it's dumb. If I can't easily type a shortcut with one hand, it shouldn't be a standard shortcut.

I'm suggesting the standard paste should behave as expected, not adhere to some literal definition the user doesn't care about. If I copy a passage of text from one document and paste it into another, I generally want it to look like it belongs in the destination document but I don't want to lose obvious intentional styling such as italicization.

The common case should be the easy case. Instead we have the common case and the four-fingered shortcut both doing the wrong thing. Awesome.

I think implementing "obvious intentional styling" is an AI problem. Suppose you copy a header, click in a normal paragraph, and paste. Keep styling information? Case 2: copy styled text from Keynote, and paste. Keep styling?

Maybe, the logic in a word processor should be to keep character styling, but not paragraph styling, but I think there will be many edge cases (for example, the user might be using the word processor as a document layout package)

I doubt those edge cases can be programmed away; user intervention is required. Microsoft solves that after the paste. That may be the better solution.

You can't program away edge cases, but the current standard behavior fails in the bog standard common case.

This isnt just about copying Word. Mac Mail has the same paste with formatting behavior. As does Evernote for that matter.

> Using shortcuts in IDEs is a nightmare on most apple keyboard. e.g. Intellij, to run your program: alt-shift-f10. This is daft in itself, but it actually translates to function-alt-shift-f10 on many keyboards. Yes, you can change your settings, but then you could remap all your keys in any O/S. Miss the function key and you've just muted your volume.

I really find that hard to see as anything but the IDE's fault, probably due to cross platform shortcuts not rethought for OS X - but even then, something like 40 base non-function keys times at least four combinations of modifiers, and something as important as running the program gets relegated to alt-shift-F10?

> I really find that hard to see as anything but the IDE's fault,

That's fine, but the IDE is an application running on the OS X platform. OS X has these problems just as much as any platform, but the situation is made worse by their use of the function keys and by poor choices for other shortcuts.

System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Use all F1, ... as standard function keys

I found this issue when using all kinds of programs, so here's a little trick using AppleScript. Put the following into a file in your home directory (I call mine .f12Keys)

  tell application "System Preferences"
      activate
      set current pane to pane "com.apple.preference.keyboard"
  end tell

  tell application "System Events"
      tell application process "System Preferences"
          click checkbox 1 of tab group 1 of window "Keyboard"
      end tell
      tell application "System Preferences" to quit
  end tell

Then, put the following line into your .bash_profile.

  alias f12="osascript .f12Keys"

Now whenever you need to switch the default behavior of function keys, simply open a new terminal window and type "f12". It takes my computer about half a second to execute. That's kind of the brilliance of Apple products and Cocoa. If there's something you do frequently, if it's in a GUI or otherwise, so long as it's written in Cocoa you can automate it. Yeah, most Apple users have never heard of AppleScript, but for those who use it for the little things every day, it's quite helpful.

IntelliJ actually provides two sets of MacOS keyboard shortcuts, for some reason. The non-default (MacOS 10.5+) is generally far better.

And the IntelliJ family of products has one of the most configurable sets of keyboard shortcut sets I've ever seen. You can literally set any feature available to any keyboard shortcut you want to, if you want paste to be 5 keys go for it, so complaining about this is senseless.

If you don't like it, change it. Keyboard shortcuts can be (re)defined, on a per-app basis or universally, in the Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard preferences.

I could never remember the various screen shot shortcuts, so for me it's command-escape for the clipboard and option-escape for straight to a file.

It took me less than a minute to change Pages so command-v pastes matching style, and command-option-v pastes with the original style. Even better, Pages's menus display the new shortcuts.

The latest Pages doesn't really seem to have paragraph styles vs. character styles, so it might be more difficult to pull that off, but Automator is very clever, and AppleScript moreso, so I'm betting it's possible.

    > Paste and match style (incredibly useful) is "alt-shift-
    > command-v" i.e. four keys . . . Four is too many. Three 
    > is too many for such an important function.

I've literally never heard of this functionality before, in any application, on any platform.