Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

277 points by unbroken 4 years ago | 186 comments

I don't know if you have noticed that if you copy+paste into email pages/apps like outlook and gmail they bring over all the formatting and styling of the source. That is, it pastes the text in with things like the font color and background color, and the font type itself, which then become the styling for the rest of the email if you keep typing as well.

Who came up with this? It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email, where there is no guarantee (indeed, little chance) that it will mesh well. It's just baffling.

bombledmonk 4 years ago |

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work.

Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how.

https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

hanoz 4 years ago | |

> In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v.

Sometimes that trick just stops working for no reason at all, then there's nothing else for it but to paste into notepad.exe and re-copy.

jimlikeslimes 4 years ago | | |

Just to kind of address the Outlook issue, you can also set the default paste setting to be text only. (sigh) we have to do this.

haxorito 4 years ago | |

I’d say it’s all backwards default copy-paste should be just text and then you can go overboard with adding +shift to combination or +alt

bryanrasmussen 4 years ago | |

On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.

wintermutestwin 4 years ago | | |

Thanks so much for this - I can't imagine how much time I have wasted jumping through goofy hoops trying to change the formatting in gmail.

If only there was a way to set this as the default and format pasting as the shift setting.

FWIW, shift+command+v works for me...

tbrock 4 years ago | | |

I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.

vandahm 4 years ago | | |

That's a lot of finger gymnastics, but it's probably better than `pbpaste|pbcopy`, which is how I've been doing it all these years.

barbazoo 4 years ago | | |

That's guitar barre chord level difficulty

antifa 4 years ago | | |

I wish MSTeams supported ancient well established UI/UX conventions, this one most of all.

ZeWaka 4 years ago | |

It's incredibly annoying in Outlook. Every other Microsoft product I've used like Word supports the key-combo, but of course Outlook has to be different.

rhino369 4 years ago | | |

In word, Cntrl Shift V just applies formatting. You have to Ctrl V wait hit Cntrl again and then hit T.

icelancer 4 years ago | | |

My company switched to Office over Google and this is by far the worst thing I've come across, and that's saying a lot.

TurkishPoptart 4 years ago | | |

Fucking Microsoft. Why can't things be simple and standardized?

soheil 4 years ago | |

Any way is to paste inside a non-textrich area like the browser address bar and then immediately copy the content again to get rid of the styling.

jhot 4 years ago | | |

I do this all the time. Cmd+tab into browser, cmd+t, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+w, cmd+tab to where I need to paste, cmd+v

But now that I've seen you can add shift to remove formatting, I'll have to try to remember to do that instead.

SilasX 4 years ago | |

Oh wow I had always gotten into the habit of copying into a simple text editor first if I wanted to strip out the formatting.

pbhjpbhj 4 years ago | | |

I often copy to Notepad on Windows, but careful, some characters get silently dropped.

mhdhn 4 years ago | |

It's worse in the smartphone world, at least on iOS. There isn't any notion of paste-plain-text. If I want that, eg in Mail app, I have to use the app Plain Text. It feels like crap.

s0rce 4 years ago | |

I hate outlook blocking that. No idea why you would implement that not working.

astolarz 4 years ago | |

In Outlook, go to Options > Mail > Editor Options > Advanced > Cut, Copy, Paste > change the drop downs for the various scenarios to "Keep Text Only" to always strip formatting.

benhurmarcel 4 years ago | |

On Windows I like to use this: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

ineedasername 4 years ago |

>It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email

I do it all the time when I need to email a small table from excel instead of attaching the whole sheet, especially when it's backed by data that should never be sent in an email. It works fine.

I used to not be able to do this. Content didn't paste nicely, or recipient clients didn't display it nicely. These days it's no longer an issue, clients mostly seem to handle it without issue.

Steltek 4 years ago | |

This highlights my true desire: I want to copy structure, not specific font choices. Or in other words, I want the HTML tags but not the CSS.

Rich paste annoys me most when the content I paste has a different notion of what plain paragraph words should look like. And "ctrl-shift-v" isn't helpful if you're trying to paste in a list or something.

strongpigeon 4 years ago | | |

Some of the copying of font style makes a bit more sense if you consider that Outlook used (still use?) Wingding to display smiley faces. Now whether they should have done that in the first place is another question, but for the sake of back compatibility I can see why it's important to keep.

boardwaalk 4 years ago | |

Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.

ineedasername 4 years ago | | |

formatting comes with it. I do a lot of formatting to make things more user friendly & readable. Otherwise it just looks like a wall of text & numbers.

Edit: my preference, if it's something that has to be reusable, is to do all of this sort of thing with tools that make the end result self-service & automated. But there's a lot of one-off work too, and more complex analysis usually takes place in a stats program or R or Python, and it's much easier to paste some output from there into excel and do some nice formatting quickly rather than coding it all in a way that would make it production-ready.

AyyWS 4 years ago | |

This is the one time keeping format is useful. I still frequently have to paste a table or graph as an image, because it still changes on paste.

ghusto 4 years ago |

This! I thought I was going insane, that nobody has mentioned this until now. "When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

It is mind crushingly annoying, second in nerve-o-smashing only to useless mouse over popups all over a UI. "Here, let me just smack a popup over what you're reading because there's now about 0.2cm of the screen you can place your mouse that _doesn't_ do that. What does it say? Oh, it just repeats the name of the link it's over".

zeven7 4 years ago | |

> useless mouse over popups all over a UI

I go back and forth on whether I want to disable intellisense and tips in VS Code because half the time I feel like it's helpful, but the other half of the time it's covering up other code I need to reference to finish typing.

ghusto 4 years ago | | |

Me too. I finally settled on disabling it, but having it trigger with a keyboard shortcut.

Sakos 4 years ago | | |

IDEA does this too. It's infuriating.

nemothekid 4 years ago | |

>"When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

I feel like it has been like this, at least on Windows, for more than 10 years. I remember working on projects in highschool, copying data from the browser to Microsoft Word and having to remove formatting.

tablespoon 4 years ago | |

> This! I thought I was going insane, that nobody has mentioned this until now. "When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

I feel like this worked sensibly until maybe 5 years ago.

toyg 4 years ago | | |

Nah, much much older.

Some tools started to go that way in the '90s. About 15 years ago the "war on email format" ended with the victory of html, and already this behaviour was widespread - Word and Outlook were already working like that by then.

What has changed in the last decade or so is that the "paste as plain text" options are increasingly harder to find, and occasionally have been dropped altogether.

marssaxman 4 years ago | |

It always has been like this- as far as my experience goes, anyway: I clearly remember styled copy & paste in the classic Macintosh operating system, all the way back in 1985.

twic 4 years ago |

At least two people want to paste with formatting:

https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe...

I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting.

Given how often this comes up, and how irritating all programmers evidently find this, i would really love to read a detailed writeup of this feature; its history, how popular it really is, how people use it, etc. It seems likely there's a big story here we're all completely missing.

asoneth 4 years ago | |

I've heard the same, but the story was apocryphal.

Specifically that when they needed to decide which paste style should be the default "Paste" operation it was a combination of user research and a bias towards novice-friendly defaults that led them to pick paste-with-formatting as the default and paste-as-plain-text as the alternative.

I'd also be interested in seeing the actual research and design rationale.

moralestapia 4 years ago | |

>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting

Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

InitialLastName 4 years ago | | |

If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?

Gibbon1 4 years ago | | |

I don't doubt they want to. That's not the same as they should. I think actually you have three groups.

  1. Most of the people on this thread that want default text. 
  2. People that carefully format documents.
  3. Idiots.

The first two find copying the style over to be super annoying. Both have to remove it as a second step. The last don't know any better. That latter group is much larger than the first two.

lucisferre 4 years ago | | |

I think you overestimate the majority of users' ability to make good UX decisions.

twic 4 years ago | | |

On what basis do you doubt it?

jstummbillig 4 years ago |

If you have rarely worked with average people in any non-tech-producing-but-software-using sector, I can see how this might be confusing.

If you have, the answer becomes crystal clear, very quickly: A staggering amount of information gets passed around by people copying random websites into word documents and just needing them to make visual sense without additional effort, because if that was not the case productivity would absolutely plummet, over people fighting to format documents back into readability (or maybe they would just go right back to screenshotting or gasp prints).

linuxdaemon 4 years ago |

It seems most of my posts here end up being a complaint about MS Teams. So here is another. Teams will happily take the formatting of "black text" from copying from Word for example. But anyone who is using a dark theme on Teams now can't read it because it "intelligently" kept the formatting that didn't even matter because it was just "plain back text". Had it been copied from something that didn't specify that formatting, it would have just worked.

bluedino 4 years ago | |

It also brings over "On 13:05pm on 5/2/2010, linuxdaemon said:"

marcosdumay 4 years ago | | |

And removes lines and leading spaces. Turns colons into emoji....

Too 4 years ago | |

Mmmmmm, MS Teams... Don't get me started. Try pasting a code snippet into MS Teams, it will happily remove all the indentation - even if you paste it in a code block! Extra good luck with yaml. Some people at work now started taking screenshots when sharing small snippets to work around this nonsense.

Going in the other direction, trying to select and copy a single line from a chat message will copy the entire message. Who even comes up with features like this?

mattkevan 4 years ago | |

Teams is a complete tire-fire and I despise using it. Even by Microsoft's standards it's laughably bad.

bobbylarrybobby 4 years ago | |

Does making the background in Word white and not just "default" fix this?

linuxdaemon 4 years ago | | |

It would make sense that it would if the formatting was specified (though MS rarely makes much sense). I can't test this myself. I only have access to word online, and (unless I'm blind) there is no way to specify background on a text/paragraph in the online version.

eoghann 4 years ago |

I just imagined trying to explain to my non-techy colleagues how to get the pasted "stuff" to look like the copied "stuff" and that pretty much answered the question...

Everything about Windows and Microsoft office is annoying to someone who knows how to use a computer properly; unfortunately, the vast majority of people using them do not. I work with people who use Excel every day and will still do the maths in their head and type into the cells because formulas are too difficult for them to master.

WalterGR 4 years ago | |

> Everything about Windows and Microsoft office is annoying to someone who knows how to use a computer properly; unfortunately, the vast majority of people using them do not.

A perfectly acceptable way of using a computer properly is getting one’s task done with the least amount of hassle.

Since MacOS and, to some extent, iOS copy formatting as well, there seems to be some agreement that it’s the behavior that leads to less hassle for the l^Huser.

pupppet 4 years ago |

It's tough because you don't want the formatting...until you. If I'm editing text that has a few bolded words I'd be immediately annoyed if the pasted text didn't have the bolded instances.

Willamin 4 years ago | |

Great point!

I'd then suggest that formatting that always conveys meaning (bold, italics, etc) should be copy/pasted.

On the other hand, formatting that often doesn't convey meaning (font face, foreground color, background color, shadows, etc) should not be copied by default.

A three-way option to system-wide (and per application) configure the behavior for control/command + x/c/v would be nice:

    * smart copy/paste (what I just described) as the default
    * copy/paste as plain text
    * copy/paste with full formatting

stevesimmons 4 years ago | | |

> font face

Except where you're copying math and all your Greek alphas change to a.

Your smart copy/paste would be great if it is smart enough to infer the right options from context, and update from my subsequent adjustments.

pupppet 4 years ago | | |

Yep totally agree. The number of times I've pasted into a WYSIWYG editor and discovered a mess of nested divs that came along for the ride...

xcambar 4 years ago |

Many users, and maybe most outside HN, either:

* don't care about the misformatting

* actually want the red font and underlining from the web page they're copying from.

sph 4 years ago | |

They want the red font more often than they just want the text, and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact font?

These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)

ineedasername 4 years ago | | |

Hardly sasquatch. It's extremely common where I work. Your experience simply isn't representative of the population.

Also these days clients don't have much of a problem handling things. I don't know exactly when, but at some point I went from not being able to paste excel into an email without it being unusably messy to having it paste nearly perfectly on formatting.

xcambar 4 years ago | | |

My family. Their friends.

A data point is not a statistic but that's quite a data point for me :D

eoghann 4 years ago | | |

I work with them every day and it's a real struggle :'-)

"Can you show me how to make a chart in Excel again?"

gumby 4 years ago |

This has been how I remember copy/paste working on the on the Alto back in the 1970s. I believe copy/paste was invented by Larry Tesler and it wasn't just in the editor (Bravo/Gypsy -- I can no longer remember) but worked this way in other programs as well.

PARC was a magical place back then.

Tagbert 4 years ago |

I’m sure Win/Mac/Lin all support multiple formats in their clipboard that can be requested by the apps upon paste.

To support this should also be standard key combinations that allow the user to paste plain text or rich text as needed. I often want to paste plain text but I’m OK if I need to use an additional modifier for that. I can see reasons why most people expect a rich text result based on history so I don’t think it is worth disrupting that precedent. Those of us, to whom it matters can adapt.

Apps should also provide clipboard controls to chose the paste format. Sometimes there are additional paste types that would be relevant. Some apps, like the MS Office apps do this but it is not universal.

topspin 4 years ago |

Copying anything other than the characters/code points/whatever by default is a misfeature. Should it be possible to copy formatting? Yes, of course, in those rare, specialized cases when it's useful and likely to work in a sane manner. Otherwise it's a bad idea.

I wish I could speak with the people behind text selection in Microsoft Word and other applications. The selection automatically expands to include additional characters, usually whitespace characters although other junk gets pulled in as well, and is a frustration. The behavior seems incoherent; grabbing extra characters for unfathomable reasons.

When the user expends effort to precisely select something this should be respected, not interpreted as an opportunity to apply whatever heuristic gymnastics someone, somewhere for some reason thought was a good idea.

FabHK 4 years ago |

It seems to me that the general paradigm is that the copy/paste operation copies over everything, if the receiving app supports it, and degrades gracefully, otherwise. In other words: copy over as much as possible.

Mail supports rich text, so that's what's copied.

Agreed though: in the scenario you describe, it's often not what's desired, but that's why there's another key combination to support this use case without breaking the consistency of the general paradigm.

pinacarlos90 4 years ago |

Plain text copy/paste should be the default and crtl+shift+v to include formatting

wnissen 4 years ago |

Rich text is high-entropy, plain text is strictly lower entropy. If you lose the painstakingly applied formatting, you'll be sad, at least sadder than you were if you had to reset the formatting, which is comparatively easy.

I get you, my emails are plain text by default, but this is a relatively straightforward answer. Microsoft has been using rich text pasting since the 90s, I think. It was definitely considered a big feature in that era.

nend 4 years ago |

It's useful if you want to copy, say a bulleted list over, or keep various bold/italicized words.

I would say it's usually 50/50 whether I want to keep the formatting or not. But either way most applications support both copy with formatting and copy without formatting.

Tomte 4 years ago |

It gets worse: on Microsoft Edge I have to wait half a second or so after selecting text before I press Ctrl-C. If I try to copy too fast it won't copy.

Yes, this "cloud clipboard" thing is off, verbatim copy is on. i have no idea why on earth they do this, but there is some three dots overlay popping up after selecting text.

I have no plugins or similar installed. It drives me crazy.

kazinator 4 years ago |

> Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

I would say, 1980s integrated office appllications for the Macintosh, like ClarisWorks.

> It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email

It absolutely makes a ton of sense: often you want to copy text containing bullets, bolding, italics, underlining and ... oh: tables?

There are times when you don't want the formatting, like for instance when you just want to quote some passage of text, without quoting its 24 point font.

It is essential to have a command to paste without formatting. You need it both ways.

In 2022, can't you get an e-mail program whose editor has paste with and without formatting?

praestigiare 4 years ago | |

Yes, you can get such an editor, but it is annoying that this is something you cannot rely on the OS to consistently do.

joeman1000 4 years ago |

I’m looking at a company… it’s name starts with Micro… I am currently forced to work in excel today and I can’t describe how excruciating it is to do even the simplest things. This may be a ‘spreadsheet thing’, or it may be a MS thing (probably both). Coming from a few hours in emacs into a big-ol’ spreadsheet just shocks my system. I can’t get over how many idiosyncratic and unintuitive things they can cram into one screenful. It’s a feat in mass user torture. I’m going to write a proper post on why no one should use excel, especially if they’re in a technical field.

alin23 4 years ago |

Yea it’s annoying more often than it’s useful. As always, there’s a macOS app for that: https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste

knoebber 4 years ago |

I sometimes copy paste things into the browser URL bar to strip formatting

terom 4 years ago | |

Does that mean that you leak it out over DNS / Google search for autocomplete?

tablespoon 4 years ago | |

Me too. Copy-pasting with formatting is almost always what I don't want.

It's even more of a disaster on a Mac, because the handling is MS Office is much worse than on Windows, and Outlook has about three total settings on its preference screen, so there's no way (I can tell) to change the default behavior.

CharlesW 4 years ago | | |

> …there's no way (I can tell) to change the default behavior.

If you're willing to try a menubar app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1611378436

Digit-Al 4 years ago | |

Why not just use ctrl-alt-v to paste without formatting? Or right-click and select "paste special", then select "plain text"?

calvano915 4 years ago | |

I use notepad

someweirdperson 4 years ago | | |

I use the outlook subject line.

luxeo223 4 years ago |

Ctrl-Shift-V pastes without formatting in most applications

tlb 4 years ago | |

Command-option-shift-V in Safari. A real finger-twister.

msbarnett 4 years ago | | |

You can remap “paste-and-match-style” to command-v globally, thankfully.

egypturnash 4 years ago | | |

cmd-opt-shift-v works on any well-behaved OSX application, not just in Safari.

Someone1234 4 years ago | |

Not most applications, a handful of applications. The receiving application itself has to implement it as custom logic.

luxeo223 4 years ago | | |

Wouldn’t most applications that support rich text input inherit it from the browser, the underlying framework for native apps and/or be implementing styling themselves already (i.e. code editors)? I’m trying to enumerate applications that I use and I’m struggling to come up with more than Google Sheets, where paste without formatting is a drop-down menu instead.

swah 4 years ago |

Conclusion: the majority of HN never saw how a non-technical person uses a computer.

yubiox 4 years ago |

I keep a terminal with vim open, almost every time I copy I paste there and recopy. So stupid and annoying.

moralestapia 4 years ago |

Thank you for posting this, I wanted to ask HN about it sometime.

I have no clue why somebody thought this was a good idea.

In 20 years of using computers everyday, I have never, EVER, had the need to copy the source format into whatever thing I'm doing. On the contrary, every single time I open Notepad, paste it there and copy it again ... I know about ctrl+shift+v or something, but I never get it right and also I already have developed muscle memory for Notepad.

Also, who decided that pasting w/ format should be the default behavior, sorry but, wtf.

Is there any real use case for this? Anyone finds this useful? Any scenario where this is actually useful and I'm missing it because I'm not familiar with X?

bee_rider 4 years ago | |

If you are copying over, for example, a paragraph or a list for a paper, you'd want the formatting, right? (I don't really have a horse in this fight, primarily use LaTeX for this sort of stuff, but I find it vaguely interesting -- it seems to be a case where people have workflows that they are really invested in).

moralestapia 4 years ago | | |

>If you are copying over, for example, a paragraph or a list for a paper, you'd want the formatting, right?

Not really. For lists it may make some sense, but then if it brings the bullet style/spacing/etc from the source it still wouldn't work for me.

marssaxman 4 years ago | |

If you are editing a text document, you will likely want to move pieces of it around. In the context of WYSIWYG document creation, styling information is part of the content; having to re-apply the style settings every time you moved the text would be annoying.

paxys 4 years ago |

The OS will actually copy both the raw text and text with formatting. It's up to the client app to let you choose which one to paste. Most of them offer both ("paste without formatting").

HanyouHottie 4 years ago |

My go-to method to strip formatting was Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X (or C), Esc. This opens the run box, pastes the text (without formatting, because it's the run box), selects it, copies it, and closes the run box. It can be done quickly and entirely with the left hand.

Then I found this neat little program [1] that will paste without formatting for you with a single hotkey.

[1]: http://stevemiller.net/PureText/

kelnos 4 years ago |

I think this makes perfect sense, but I agree it can be annoying. I wouldn't want a copy-paste operation to be lossy by default. If I were copying a table or something like that, I would almost certainly want that formatting preserved at the destination.

To me, the real problem is that when you don't want to bring formatting along, it's not obvious how to do that, and it's not implemented universally. Fix that, and I don't think there'd be as much to complain about.

munk-a 4 years ago |

If copy-paste didn't copy formatting it'd be impossible to copy formatting without a special other interaction - it's usually easy enough to get around this behavior by either using ctrl+shift+v or else paste into a plain text editor and copy out of there.

I almost never appreciate this feature but I can comprehend why it exist and it'd be extremely awkward for users that rely on it if it didn't.

pavlov 4 years ago |

Trying to literally answer your question of who came up with this:

I'm pretty sure Windows 95 already allowed rich text on the clipboard (using the RTF format), and at least Word and Excel both supported it. Mac OS X also had RTF support from the start.

Nowadays most desktop applications write HTML to the clipboard instead of RTF, I believe. And that's how the formatting ends up in your Gmail editor inside a browser.

compiler-guy 4 years ago | |

MacOS Classic 6.0 (maybe even earlier) also included formatting on the clipboard. Don’t think it was rtf in those days though. But definitely preserved formatting as early as 1990. Maybe earlier.

Ekaros 4 years ago |

I think it kinda makes sense when you are using other Office tools. Formatting in that case might be something user wants.

The insane perversion comes from copying from VSCode where you get even the background colour?!?! Or the fun thing that copying formatting sometimes works from Linux running in Virtualbox...

RajT88 4 years ago |

As some have pointed out, CTRL+SHIFT+V will save you here on Windows.

It was annoying before I learned this trick; I had been using Notepad instead to strip formatting.

With the shortcut, this is fine for me for most apps.

What drives me barking, raving, drooling mad is the fact that it is possible for an app to lock the clipboard. Bad apps will silently cause the clipboard to fail to update, which leads to the attentive interrupting their work to go back and re-copy. The less attentive, this leads to them sending a message they did not intend to send!

Bad apps locking the clipboard have been around for a long time now, but seem to have been becoming more common lately. As near as I can tell the locking behavior started with Windows 7, but may have actually been Vista (I never used Vista for my day-to-day work, just test environment).

rootusrootus 4 years ago | |

I wonder if there is a similar workaround in MacOS. I've gotten quite used to putting things in Sublime as an intermediate step to strip formatting, I'd love to be able to skip that.

kennywinker 4 years ago | | |

Command-option-shift-V or "claw paste" as I call it

K7PJP 4 years ago | | |

Edit ‣ Paste and Match Style is available in most applications. You can assign it to a keyboard shortcut if it's not assigned to one in the app you're using.

Also, I use Typinator, and have assigned an abbreviation to paste as plain text. Text expansion tools are indispensable.

Kozmik1 4 years ago |

It's amazing that Microsoft works so hard on this bs, but does zero to have Excel support copying newline separated (or comma separated, otherwise clearly dilineated) text pop into Excel properly on paste, something that would actually be useful!

ochrist 4 years ago |

In some programs on Windows, you can use Shift + F10 which will bring up a special menu with some options concerning copy and paste. If you can choose 'Insert special ...' from this menu you can now select how you want to insert from the clipboard (works on some versions of Excel and also some browsers). This also seems to work in Linux, but I don't know about Mac.

lostlogin 4 years ago |

Another issue with copy + paste is that history isn’t preserved. Why a clipboard manager isn’t a piece of the OS is a mystery to me.

Every so often I wonder how much data is lost by copying over the copy and then finding the initial copy is gone.

Hamcha 4 years ago |

I'd wager there's enough people, but I never looked into it so I have no data other than the people I know IRL.

I will add something though, I don't think the other way lends itself too well to being "discoverable". I just had my brother copy some data across documents with different formatting and he didn't know that "paste without formatting" was ever an option and now I think, if it ever worked the other way around, would I ever know that "Paste with formatting" is an option if the app defaults to unformatted paste?

NKosmatos 4 years ago |

Thank you for this!!! I’m sick and tired of seeing emails with 4 different fonts/style/formatting. I hate stupid Microsoft programs (I’m looking at you Outlook and Teams) that insist on copying all the stupid info from a message. I have no problem with copying the style, but they should use a new key or option for it. Leave copy paste as it is (yeah I know about paste special and paste text only and almost all other tricks mentioned here).

d--b 4 years ago |

At some point in history, rich text formatting was pretty uniform. Copying from word to textpad or outlook just worked.

You definitely wanted to keep what was in italics, bold, superscript and so on, so at least that made sense.

Then why not fonts and colors? From a word document to powerpoint, it makes sense to keep all the formatting.

What messed everything up is the web. You can’t paste anything into gmail without the formatting to be all screwed.

It’s annoying indeed.

ciabattabread 4 years ago |

It’s threads like this that remind me that this website is a niche website.

Computing today is meant for the general public. Remember WYSIWYG? Same principles apply here.

bob1029 4 years ago |

Maybe we just need a simple way to turn this behavior on/off at the operating system level? Clearly, there are strong arguments for both sides.

superjan 4 years ago |

This is mostly the office team deciding that this is useful. Probably to provide a consistent experience when copying between apps within the suite.

You can turn off.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28478/copy-and-paste-in-outl...

jiveturkey 4 years ago |

It makes perfect sense! I guess you didn't know, Cmd-shift-V pastes the plain text only, in all or nearly all applications.

wasmitnetzen 4 years ago |

Even in Linux, it's surprisingly hard to make plain pasting the default. I once tried to research how to switch the Ctrl+Shift+V behaviour with Ctrl+V on KDE, and I gave up after a while. Couldn't find a way.

Ctrl+Shift+V doesn't even show up in the Shortcuts config, despite working in every program I've tried and Ctrl+V being in the list.

strongpigeon 4 years ago |

Outlook used the (still uses? dunno) Wingding font to display smiley faces. To be able to copy paste that would mean copying the formatting as well. Not sure if that's the original reason for it, but it's definitely a use of this. Lots of users would be confused to see their smiley faces turn into "J"s.

nautilius 4 years ago |

It's amazing for job applications if you're on the receiving end: there is no faster shortcut for triaging an application to "Deleted Items" than mismatched formatting of my name, or "I am really interested in $SOME_SNIPPET_FROM_MY_WEBSITE".

jonnycomputer 4 years ago |

On a Mac, copying text from my terminal to Outlook, or to Excel, copies in formatting too. A little frustrating when you copy text from a dark mode theme into a non-dark mode theme and it looks like nothing was copied at all because its all just 'white'.

zora_goron 4 years ago |

This small alias can clear the formatting from whatever you have copied to your clipboard on macOS (not sure what the equivalents of `pbcopy`/`pbpaste` are on other OS's):

  alias noformat="pbpaste | pbcopy"

mohamez 4 years ago |

THIS!

I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this reason, why the hell would that be the norm?

pengo 4 years ago |

The clipboard data format for copying and pasting is determined by whoever wrote the software. Some software allows for format conversion of copied data at the point of pasting; again, that's a decision made by the software provider.

ww520 4 years ago |

Yes, it's really annoying. In the past I had resorted to copy/paste into Emacs and then copy/paste out into the destination app. Then I learned about the Ctrl+Shift+V trick and just rolled with that.

Vladimof 4 years ago |

I usually paste it in an edit box that doesn't accept formatting list Firefox's search box and copy and paste again to get rid of stupid formating... but I agree that this shouldn't be the default

fredsmith219 4 years ago |

I like the option. If I want the formatting stripped I paste the text into notepad++, then copy that text. Otherwise I get all the formatting and don't need to reapply it.

kcexn 4 years ago |

Was this a decision? I thought Copy+Paste would just have copied the data in the buffer and paste out the data in the buffer. All metadata and stuff attached.

adamrezich 4 years ago |

Win+R notepad Enter Ctrl+V Ctrl+A Ctrl+X is just embedded in my muscle memory at this point and I wish it didn't have to be.

hitgeek 4 years ago |

agreed, like others I often resort to using notepad to remove all styling then copy/paste again.

leaflets2 4 years ago |

I hit ctrl-f and paste, copy again in the app's search field - then the formatting disappears.

renewiltord 4 years ago |

Cmd-Shift-V and forget about things.

k__ 4 years ago |

More importantly:

Who decided links are part of styling and should be filtered out when you past without styling?!

groffee 4 years ago |

Just paste it into notepad/gedit/plain text editor first, then recopy it from there.

sophacles 4 years ago | |

Yeah right. If you just want the obvious basic functionality, you just need to do extra steps!

When people ask me why I like my CLI and TUI apps so much this is the example I give. It's much less likely that some UI/UX person has been involved and this means the the workflow will be logical and oriented to the task at hand.

Kuraj 4 years ago | |

OP probably know about this, they're just making a point that this should be default behavior.

aeyes 4 years ago | |

Is there any plain text editor shipped with MacOS?

jonsen 4 years ago | | |

TextEdit:

"If there’s a format you prefer for new documents, you can set the default format. Choose TextEdit > Preferences, click New Document, then select “Rich text” or “Plain text” below Format."

kurupt213 4 years ago |

I agree that copying formatting should be the special case instead of copying the text only

carom 4 years ago |

I just paste it into the URL bar and re-copy. Ctrl+l, ctrl+v, ctrl+a, ctrl+c.

freitasm 4 years ago |

And recently sometimes ctrl-shift-v seems to not work in any application.

Neil44 4 years ago |

Paste into Notepad then copy again to get rid of formatting.

UI_at_80x24 4 years ago |

I agree with you 100%.

__mharrison__ 4 years ago |

Obviously not an emacs user... (wink)

Vosporos 4 years ago |

The Devil.

erellsworth 4 years ago |

It was me. Sorry, my bad.

ledjon 4 years ago |

1000% agreed

more_corn 4 years ago |

Idiots

standardly 4 years ago |

ctrl+shift+v

lfkdev 4 years ago |

strg+shift+v

NegativeLatency 4 years ago | |

My clipboard manager (flycut) also strips formatting which is really handy