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.