5 ms·
> Speaking of keyboard shortcuts provides the right segue to the clipboard behavior. I don’t know who had the brilliant idea of making copy and paste preserve t
by cbm-vic-20 5y ago
> Speaking of keyboard shortcuts provides the right segue to the clipboard behavior. I don’t know who had the brilliant idea of making copy and paste preserve the formatting of the source text. This is almost never ever what you want.
+1
- humanistbot 5y agoMost people who aren't programmers expect formatting to be copied and pasted.
- uuyi 5y agoHaving watched my mother swearing at this on numerous occasions I would not make that assumption.
- dataflow 5y agoI think it depends on what you're copying. If you're copying text only, then no. But if you're copying text with images or other non-text elements, then possibly yes.
- jmmv 5y agoI think it also depends on where you are copying from and pasting into. If it's within the same document, you likely want to maintain everything. If it is within the same app (different docs), you may want to maintain everything. If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting. But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts. Anyhow... so many options that a single feature doesn't fit all. The problem with Windows is the lack of a uniform solution to paste without formatting (my complaint) as opposed to macOS.
- dataflow 5y ago> But as you well said, respecting images, tables and the like is one thing. The other is keeping fonts. Oh, to clarify: I meant: "if you're copying text along with images, you probably want to keep the text formatting [fonts etc.] too, whereas if you're only copying text, you probably don't want the formatting either." It's not a perfect heuristic by any means, but I think it'd be better than the current situation.
- iso1210 5y ago> If it is across apps... I cannot imagine the use case for maintaining formatting You have some formatted text (maybe some bold or italic in a line) on a webpage, you want to copy it into an email (lets set aside the argument that email should be text only).
- etataetaet 5y agoHolding shift while pasting will remove all the formatting for most programs! Still annoying but usually an easy fix.
- dataflow 5y agoI'd never heard of this, thanks for the tip. I just tried it in Word and had no luck, but it worked in Chrome. Any other programs you're aware of that respect this?
- wanderer_ 5y agoThis might be because Word overrides system shortcuts (i.e. the 'paste without formatting' in this case). Google Docs tries to do this in the browser as well, but it happens to support this particular shortcut.
- dataflow 5y agoIs "paste without formatting" really a system shortcut? I'd never heard of it before. I feel like it might be something semi-standard that apps implement?
- wanderer_ 5y agoI believe I may have seen it in a shortcut editor somewhere, but I suppose I could be misremembering or that could have been a one-off implementation.
- etataetaet 5y agoYeah the two main places where it comes up for me is LebreOffice and Google Docs! I'm surprised as word doesn't have it as its quite useful. It's really nice when I'm doing citations as most titles have some annoying color / font size. I think there were a couple other programs that worked with it but I forget them! I've had quite a lot of success though as It seems like most of the programs I use respect it.
- benhurmarcel 5y agoI like to use that: https://stevemiller.net/puretext/ https://stevemiller.net/puretext/