I hate copy and paste. That is, I hate paste. That is, I hate pasting into a program that tries to preserve the formatting from where you copied it. Why do I hate this? It all has to do with formatting…
9 times out of 10 I don’t want the formatting from the source – I just want the text. I usually want to the format to match my document or my email – I don’t want it to look out of place, or worse. Most times the preservation is terrible – what you paste is just badly interpreted, and ends up looking like shit even if your trying to preserve the formatting!
Ideally, in my world, you should be able to paste anything, anywhere, without the formatting. However most programs don’t give you another option. This is the real issue.
So here’s my message to software developers: For the sake of all that’s holy – include a “Paste without Formatting” option. Like Evernote. Evernote has this option, and it’s the greatest thing since the screensaver. EVERY program should have this, but few do.
If you know of a program that supports pasting without formatting, please drop a comment with the name of it!
Worth Your Time…
Wonderful post, a bit off the topic, nevertheless truly begs reading…
By: Linda Perry on December 3, 2011
at 2:03 pm
Chrome does on Windows and Mac.
http://ca.lifehacker.com/5639828/google-chrome-now-supports-built+in-text-stripping
By: bryanf on April 26, 2011
at 7:38 am
original Chrome blog post:
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/09/tip-just-text-please.html
By: bryanf on April 26, 2011
at 7:41 am
That’s awesome, as this is where the problem tends to bite me the most (specifically, in Gmail, as cited in the example).
To keep the knowledge on this page – that’s Ctrl-Shift-V in Windows and Cmd-Shift-V on Mac, which seems to be one key shorter than the Cmd-Option-Shift-V universal option noted by Reid, and at odds with the “paste as quote” functionality. I’ll have to do some experimentation to find out what seems to work, and where.
There’s also another Windows utility linked off that lifehacker article called “Better Paste”. Link: http://lifehacker.com/5388814
Other “worthy mentions” from the comments on that page are keyboard macro scripting tools AutoHotKey at http://www.autohotkey.com/ and AutoIT at http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/
Now I think this post deserves to be in the “info” category…
By: Mike D on April 30, 2011
at 10:35 am
And for Windows, we have this recommendation from the Facebook side of the discussion: http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/
By: Mike D on April 25, 2011
at 7:34 pm
In MS office you can use “paste special” (right click or edit menu). If you set your email client to send in plain text only (which of course you should) when you paste formatted text there it generally works as well… another reason not to use HTML in email!
And of course as Reid notes, it works universally on Macs, which really I can not believe you have switched to. Actually, scratch that, I can…
By: s on April 25, 2011
at 7:00 pm
You haven’t been keeping up with my stream – I am on the Mac now, pretty much 100% of the time. (I even bought Pages the other day) Just didn’t know about this handy little tidbit.
And along the same line of keeping up with the times, I also don’t believe that email should be plaintext only any more. I do however and wherever possible, send it via UUCP.
By: Mike D on April 25, 2011
at 7:18 pm
Xcode and almost all Mac apps do: instead of cmd-V you do shift-cmd-option-V. I think shift-cmd-V is for pasting as a quote.
Reid
By: Reid on April 25, 2011
at 5:26 pm
Learn something new every day! My first thought was, “bet it doesn’t work in Gmail” – but, it does. Thanks Reid!
By: Mike D on April 25, 2011
at 7:12 pm