Can somebody explain why "paste with formatting" is so widely the default option? I have literally never wanted to paste with formatting and neither have multiple family members who have needed help with preventing it from happening.

IMO if paste with formatting was assigned another shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+V and the default Ctrl+V was without formatting, that would be less frustrating.

If you sit someone who doesn't know How Links Work in front of some text with an inline hyperlink in it, then try to get them to copy it over to another place, you end up wanting to get to this default pretty quickly. "Right click copy link address" is real unintuitive. I've never wanted the text formatting itself to come over, bold text and headings and whatnot, but since that lives in about the same conceptual space, it's a casualty of design.

It would be pretty trivial to paste without formatting but still auto-parse links. Many apps do the link parsing on the client side, so it's not a formatting concern at all.

That's fine if the text you're copying spells out the URL, but often it will be just a word(s) that are hyperlinked, so if pasted as plain text the software you paste into has no idea there was a URL linked at all.

(But I too wish plain text pasting was the default more often.)

How would that work in the case where the link display text is not the address? Normally pasting without formatting discards the fact that some text like “download other file” is a link.

History. The Mac didn’t have “paste without formatting”, and assigned ⌘-V to “paste with formatting”.

Even if it had, they might have made it the default, either to show of that styles copied over, or for consistency. If you paste a picture, you don’t lose formatting, either (of the picture, whatever that means, or any text in the image)

If you copied some text in MacWrite, for example, exited MacWrote, launched MacPaint, and ⌘V-ed into MacPaint, you likely wanted to keep the font, size and style.

Some programs also have several variants of “without formatting”. Excel is a good example (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?

Last time I built something on MacOS, this was basically just a feature of the clipboard API that each app could use independently. When copying to the clipboard, you could declare numerous formats for what was copied, and any app receiving clipboard input could state that they only accepted one format.

e.g. copy a jpeg file and you can paste it into Slack, and it will automatically add the image to the post. Paste it into the terminal and you'll get the absolute path to the file. Those sound like sensible defaults that are essentially 'context sensitive paste'.

You could copy a link from a webpage and store both the HTML version and a raw-text version in the clipboard, probably a version that used an annotated string, too.

For the same reason, yeah... this isn't as intuitive when it comes to software like Excel.

That has been around on the Mac since 1984 and applications were always encouraged to put plain text on the clipboard alongside formatted text, but we’re talking UI here, not technology. This kind of UI allows you to choose which of these you want because it turns out the application cannot always make the best choice.

And yet macOS now has paste without formatting in almost every app I can think of (it’s enough that I’d guess it’s a standard thing apps get if they use native frameworks) AND it’s trivial to remap a menu item to another keyboard shortcut across the entire OS.

> Some programs also have several variants of “without formatting”. Excel is a good example (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/paste-options-8ea...). Which one should be the default?

Most of those are very specific versions of formatting or specialty features.

The only ones that would qualify as "paste without formatting" are "formulas" and "values" modes, and of those two I'd probably say "formulas" is a better default.

The normal case is when you’re cut/copy/pasting intra-app. Imagine if you formatted some text and then cut/paste to move it around and by default you lost your formatting.

Yep, this would be a good reason to keep it. You could probably get around this by using a separate MIME type for your app's content. If that type is present, use it, otherwise default to no formatting.

I'm not sure how intuitive that would be for users, though, having different defaults depending on where the data is coming from.

All I can figure is that research/observation showed that:

- Normal users often prefer to paste with formatting.

- Normal users will never figure out how to do that if it's not the default.

- Normal users will usually reluctantly accept paste-with-formatting even if it's not what they wanted—that is, it's only rarely entirely unacceptable for them.

- Power users will figure out how to paste without formatting.

You think Microsoft, of Ribbon and Clippy and full-screen start menu ads, and 20 different control panels for the same settings, does UX testing...? The same Microsoft that can't decide whether normal users prefer Windows, Windows Phone, Zune, or Xbox interfaces, so they just go ahead and add a little of each to all of them?

More likely they were just worried Slack was attacking their enterprise segment and killing Skype so they rushed a shitty product to market ASAP. "Embrace, extend, extinguish" has turned into "panic, copycat, repeat".

I imagine it stems from Powerpoint or Word. If I move bolded header text from the bottom of the page to the top of the page, it would be irritating to re-apply formatting. Once you have established this precedent, easy for it to infect the rest of the ecosystem.

I do actually use it all the time. We share some slack channels with external partners but email is the main mode for some others and I have to send code, interfaces, etc on occasion and copy pasting from VS Code maintains the formatting in Apple mail which I’ve found useful. No hitting the space at a hundred times to indent a nested line. And it’s easy enough to escape.

But that behaviour everywhere would drive me nuts.

I think they mean formatting as in slightly different font, color, background or goddamn underline and the like. I have never found it useful, and would be much much better with a non-default right click past as formatted option.

Your use case will not suffer since whitespace is text.

Formatting can hugely change the way text is read. It's quite common for the spacing between sections to be derived from the formatting. So removing the formatting can result in section headings with zero space from the preceeding paragraph but a manual newline between it and the next paragraph. Thus the headings essentially disappear into the preceeding text.

I've had countless other examples over the years where "paste without formatting" involved lots of manual editing of white space. Bullet and numbered lists sometimes vanish which rather matters if the text says "see point 3 above"

I have to use the Mac plain paste shortcut all the time: shift+option+command+v (Ctrl+shift+v in windows, not sure about Linux)

Definitely a helpful shortcut!

I wish "paste without formatting" was the default, and you had to use the contortionist keyboard shortcut to include formatting.

You can change it, modify the key mapping like so:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...

Neat, thanks!

Didn’t know OS’s had their own native plain paste shortcut. I’ll start using this, thanks!

For the cases were software or OS doesn’t support native plain text paste I create a similar shortcut in Keyboard Maestro (macOS) or AutoHotKey (Windows).

As an extra measure I configure the macro to automatically type the text and not use the direct clipboard paste. This takes care of the situations were the app prohibited pasting.

Wow, that requires a lot of fingers. It's like an OS and fighting game all in one.

SiliconGraphics machines had the Vulcan death grip that took two hands to force a reboot.

Mac Shortcuts are a nightmare, jeez.

Ctrl+shift V... How about where's reply to a specific message on a desktop/web app? Isn't that like the basest of the basics? Audio and video quality is great however, millions of times ahead of Slack and a bit better than Zoom, but ever so slightly, from my experience.

>Also how can they forget an option to “paste without formatting”

That's just Microsoft.

I can probably count on one hand the amount of times I've wanted to actually retain source formatting. But, it's the default option on almost any microsoft product out there. And, apparently, on Teams it's not an option at all.

I bet Teams secretly used Word xml style tags behind the scenes.

No, it's HTML. (Source: entirely too much familiarity with that heap of garbage.)

FYI, Ctrl+Shift+V works as a paste without formatting shortcut in Teams. But for some reason I can't work out, they chose not to put it in the right-click UI.

Nothing is more painful than to watch others copy and paste complex linux commands from Teams into the terminal, and watch the shell get corrupted. Windows copy and paste has always been a mess for me. macOS seems to do it much better, but X11 middle click is the best.

Paste with formatting annoyed me so much I made a website that's just a giant textbox I can use to paste stuff into (https://qi.io)

Now that's going above and beyond.

I know there's Ctrl-Shift-V, but I use "PureText" on Windows so I can map my own hotkey.

https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

I always paste into the address bar of my browser to clear the formatting. Some other solutions here are probably better, though.

Paste without formatting is Ctrl-Shift-V, isn't it? I don't know if I've ever tried it in Teams though.

It works consistently across all MS products I use including Teams and Office365.

Hack for the character limit is to share as code. Unfortunately that adds 3 clicks to the process.

My trick for paste without formatting is to throw it in the url bar and copy it back out.

Better to use notepad. The formatting goes away, and you can copy the text back out.

if you accidentally press enter, are you ok with the browser sending that information wherever it does?

From what I've seen, a lot of people just paste screen captures.