4 ms·

asking unironically (but yeah maybe a little bitchingly) who ever thought it was a good idea to "format" clipboard content? i have never wanted it and can't ima

by m1gu3l 6y ago

asking unironically (but yeah maybe a little bitchingly) who ever thought it was a good idea to "format" clipboard content? i have never wanted it and can't imagine ever wanting it. clearly i am not weird because, here we are with a bunch of other people who clearly hate this. why are things like this not made configurable by Microsoft?

noseratio 6y ago
Might be one of those legacy poor usability decisions. Still not easy for modern Microsoft to undo, hindered by compatibility concerns and internal bureaucracy. Same as the infamous "Terminate batch job (Y/N)?" prompt, upon hitting Ctrl+C. Who would every want to continue a .BAT script after trying to stop it? To make it worse, hitting Ctrl+C again cancel that prompt and continues the script. Some lost data because of that.
kevincox 6y ago
There are definitely some cases where I like it: - Copying links. - Copying a whole webpage and keeping headings. - Sometimes keeping bold and italics are nice. However when you paste something and it just preserves the font (typeface, color and size) of the entire copy it is just annoying. Overall I think I like it most of the time. Also cook with things like GNOME Terminal's copy-as-html you can copy/past a command log with highlighting which is a killer feature. I also have a browser extension which lets my copy a bunch of Tabs as HTML links (<a href={url}>{title}</a>) which is great for pasting places that support it. I think the real problem is that there is no universal way to drop back to plain text. Ctrl-Shift-V usually works, but it isn't universal. This goes back to my idea that we should have Universal Semantic Shortcuts. For example instead of sending Ctrl-v to the app. My desktop environment should handle that and send a Paste event. And Ctrl-Shift-V should universally send a Paste even with just the plain text content. I think there are a lot of common actions that could be handled like this, and it means that you can remap Paste across all your applications. Maybe we should take inspiration from Apple and map Super-v to the Paste event and slowly transition. Since few if any Linux apps bind to the Super key (is that even possible?) it would be a good place to add these new Semantic Shortcuts.
- noseratio 6y ago
  I agree with you. I first tried to come up with a universal solution using SendInput API. This shortcut is still there: Win+Shift+Ins, and it works generally well but a tad slow. So eventually I opted to stripping formatting in-place in clipboard. As a compromise, I've added a tray menu item to disable it, when a rich text paste is desired: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postprintum/devcomrade/main/Art/menu.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postprintum/devcomrade/mai...

by m1gu3l 6y ago

noseratio 6y ago

Might be one of those legacy poor usability decisions. Still not easy for modern Microsoft to undo, hindered by compatibility concerns and internal bureaucracy. Same as the infamous "Terminate batch job (Y/N)?" prompt, upon hitting Ctrl+C. Who would every want to continue a .BAT script after trying to stop it? To make it worse, hitting Ctrl+C again cancel that prompt and continues the script. Some lost data because of that.

kevincox 6y ago

There are definitely some cases where I like it: - Copying links. - Copying a whole webpage and keeping headings. - Sometimes keeping bold and italics are nice. However when you paste something and it just preserves the font (typeface, color and size) of the entire copy it is just annoying. Overall I think I like it most of the time. Also cook with things like GNOME Terminal's copy-as-html you can copy/past a command log with highlighting which is a killer feature. I also have a browser extension which lets my copy a bunch of Tabs as HTML links (<a href={url}>{title}</a>) which is great for pasting places that support it. I think the real problem is that there is no universal way to drop back to plain text. Ctrl-Shift-V usually works, but it isn't universal. This goes back to my idea that we should have Universal Semantic Shortcuts. For example instead of sending Ctrl-v to the app. My desktop environment should handle that and send a Paste event. And Ctrl-Shift-V should universally send a Paste even with just the plain text content. I think there are a lot of common actions that could be handled like this, and it means that you can remap Paste across all your applications. Maybe we should take inspiration from Apple and map Super-v to the Paste event and slowly transition. Since few if any Linux apps bind to the Super key (is that even possible?) it would be a good place to add these new Semantic Shortcuts.

noseratio 6y ago
I agree with you. I first tried to come up with a universal solution using SendInput API. This shortcut is still there: Win+Shift+Ins, and it works generally well but a tad slow. So eventually I opted to stripping formatting in-place in clipboard. As a compromise, I've added a tray menu item to disable it, when a rich text paste is desired: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postprintum/devcomrade/main/Art/menu.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/postprintum/devcomrade/mai...