In 1984, easily transferring styled text between applications was a novelty. Apple also aimed for simplicity, and when copying between MacWrite and MacPaint (t

In 1984, easily transferring styled text between applications was a novelty. Apple also aimed for simplicity, and when copying between MacWrite and MacPaint (the only two applications everybody had), keeping formatting was the best option. Add a few decades of people getting used to that behavior, and changing it takes guts, and will upset quite a few users who know how to repair formatting after pasting, but won’t easily learn about the new keyboard combination. I also am not sure stripping formatting by default is the best choice today. See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38142074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38142074, who wants something in-between. Maybe, paste should keep only formatting of entire units being pasted? So, it would keep bold, italic, etc, but only keep line height, margins, etc. for entire paragraphs being pasted? I can see people getting highly confused about that, too, though, especially about the difference between selecting all characters in a paragraph and also selecting the paragraph boundaries.