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

277 points by unbroken 4y ago

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.

gumby 4y 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.
strongpigeon 4y 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.
xcambar 4y 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 4y 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. :-)
luxeo223 4y ago
Ctrl-Shift-V pastes without formatting in most applications
- Someone1234 4y ago
  Not most applications, a handful of applications. The receiving application itself has to implement it as custom logic.
  - luxeo223 4y 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.
- tlb 4y ago
  Command-option-shift-V in Safari. A real finger-twister.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    You can remap “paste-and-match-style” to command-v globally, thankfully.
    - ianferrel 4y ago
      Unfortunately if you do so it will break Cmd-V paste on applications that don't have that feature.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    cmd-opt-shift-v works on any well-behaved OSX application, not just in Safari.
groffee 4y ago
Just paste it into notepad/gedit/plain text editor first, then recopy it from there.
- Kuraj 4y ago
  OP probably know about this, they're just making a point that this should be default behavior.
- sophacles 4y 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.
- aeyes 4y ago
  Is there any plain text editor shipped with MacOS?
  - jonsen 4y 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."
knoebber 4y ago
I sometimes copy paste things into the browser URL bar to strip formatting
- tablespoon 4y 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 4y 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 https://apps.apple.com/app/id1611378436
- calvano915 4y ago
  I use notepad
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    I use the outlook subject line.
- terom 4y ago
  Does that mean that you leak it out over DNS / Google search for autocomplete?
- Digit-Al 4y ago
  Why not just use ctrl-alt-v to paste without formatting? Or right-click and select "paste special", then select "plain text"?
lfkdev 4y ago
strg+shift+v
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  My clipboard manager (flycut) also strips formatting which is really handy
yubiox 4y ago
I keep a terminal with vim open, almost every time I copy I paste there and recopy. So stupid and annoying.
bombledmonk 4y 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-everywhere-slack-excel-outlook-kicad-and-more/13405 https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.
  - tbrock 4y ago
    I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.
    - itcrowd 4y ago
      It's optional
    - kennywinker 4y ago
      Option was required in every app I've ever tried this in... do you somehow have different keybindings than me?
      - Foivos 4y ago
        Maybe it is related to the language of the keyboard.
      - olalonde 4y ago
        I just tried in Gmail and cmd-shift-v worked.
        spookthesunset 4y ago
nend 4y 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.
hitgeek 4y ago
agreed, like others I often resort to using notepad to remove all styling then copy/paste again.
UI_at_80x24 4y ago
I agree with you 100%.
pinacarlos90 4y ago
Plain text copy/paste should be the default and crtl+shift+v to include formatting
eoghann 4y 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 4y 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.
__mharrison__ 4y ago
Obviously not an emacs user... (wink)
twic 4y ago
At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-feature-why-no-formatted-text-rich-text/ 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.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  >the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.
  - InitialLastName 4y 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?
    - ghusto 4y ago
      Within the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.
      - mohamez 4y ago
        Exactly!
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I think it depends on your workflow -- I'd tend to assume the receiving end has some formatting, and it would be best if the copied text was fit that formatting, rather than bringing formatting with it. Ultimately though it seems pretty arbitrary, I guess they just went with the default that benefits what they assumed would be the most popular workflow. I dunno, we should all just use LaTeX to avoid these kinds of issues.
freitasm 4y ago
And recently sometimes ctrl-shift-v seems to not work in any application.
moralestapia 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
FabHK 4y 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.
ineedasername 4y 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.
- boardwaalk 4y ago
  Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.
  - ineedasername 4y 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.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      That's why the option exists. But a vast majority of the cases, it's harmful, not helpful, so it shouldn't be the default.
      - ineedasername 4y ago
        Oh, definitely. Folks that say there isn't a frequent use case for format pasting are simply working under different conditions. But while I use it frequently, it's probably more common for me to just want plain text and I would prefer that to be the default.
ghusto 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Me too. I finally settled on disabling it, but having it trigger with a keyboard shortcut.
  - Sakos 4y ago
    IDEA does this too. It's infuriating.
- tablespoon 4y 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 4y 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.
Kozmik1 4y 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!
pupppet 4y 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 4y 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
  - pupppet 4y 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...
  - stevesimmons 4y 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.
    - aendruk 4y ago
      The smart thing to do would be to convert it to α. (Or type that in the first place?)
    - xigoi 4y ago
      Why would you use a different font for Greek letters???
mohamez 4y ago
THIS! I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this reason, why the hell would that be the norm?
linuxdaemon 4y 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.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Does making the background in Word white and not just "default" fix this?
  - linuxdaemon 4y 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.
- bluedino 4y ago
  It also brings over "On 13:05pm on 5/2/2010, linuxdaemon said:"
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    And removes lines and leading spaces. Turns colons into emoji....
    - antifa 4y ago
      Remembers all unwanted formatting, forgets all desired formatting, every single time.
- Too 4y 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?
fredsmith219 4y 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.
Hamcha 4y 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?
alin23 4y 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 https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste
pavlov 4y 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 4y 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.
swah 4y ago
Conclusion: the majority of HN never saw how a non-technical person uses a computer.
paxys 4y 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").
jonnycomputer 4y 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'.
superjan 4y 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-outlook-without-messing-up-your-formatting/ https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28478/copy-and-paste-in-outl...
ciabattabread 4y 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.
carom 4y ago
I just paste it into the URL bar and re-copy. Ctrl+l, ctrl+v, ctrl+a, ctrl+c.
topspin 4y 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.
wasmitnetzen 4y 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.
Neil44 4y ago
Paste into Notepad then copy again to get rid of formatting.
Vosporos 4y ago
The Devil.
standardly 4y ago
ctrl+shift+v
wnissen 4y 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.
lostlogin 4y 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.
Tomte 4y 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.
munk-a 4y 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.
RajT88 4y 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 4y 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 4y ago
    Command-option-shift-V or "claw paste" as I call it
  - K7PJP 4y 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.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      > Typinator Thanks for the tip, I'm going to check that out.
Ekaros 4y 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...
ww520 4y 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.
kelnos 4y 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.
Vladimof 4y 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
erellsworth 4y ago
It was me. Sorry, my bad.
nautilius 4y 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".
jstummbillig 4y 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).
kazinator 4y 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 4y 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.
jiveturkey 4y 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.
leaflets2 4y ago
I hit ctrl-f and paste, copy again in the app's search field - then the formatting disappears.
k__ 4y ago
More importantly: Who decided links are part of styling and should be filtered out when you past without styling?!
HanyouHottie 4y 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/ http://stevemiller.net/PureText/
ledjon 4y ago
1000% agreed
bob1029 4y 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.
NKosmatos 4y 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).
Tagbert 4y 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.
more_corn 4y ago
Idiots
pengo 4y 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.
renewiltord 4y ago
Cmd-Shift-V and forget about things.
adamrezich 4y 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.
kurupt213 4y ago
I agree that copying formatting should be the special case instead of copying the text only
kcexn 4y 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.
d--b 4y 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.
joeman1000 4y 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.
zora_goron 4y 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"
ochrist 4y 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.