Right? I think, in 25+ years of computing, I have never once wanted to paste rich text. Ever. I just want to paste the text! Yet every time, I have to either fumble for the "paste and match style" key combo, or fix things afterwards.

FWIW, I actually have wanted that, usually when I'm copying a chunk of text and I want to keep inline hyperlinks intact. I'm not sure I want that more often than I want a plain text option that strips out all the formatting, but it does come up.

The trick is that 99% of the time I want Markdown. That is, I want hyperlinks, bullets, headers, strong, etc. to stay hyperlinks, bullets, headers, etc.

But all the other styling? The fonts, the colors, stuff like that that isn't in markdown? Nobody wants that.

Don't most apps allow you to paste plain text with Ctrl+Shift+V nowadays? That's what I almost always use, unless I have some use for the copied rich text.

Annoyingly the GitHub comment box doesn't. Incredibly frustrating to copy someones name from the GitHub webpage and paste it and it pastes as a markdown link which doesn't trigger a mention.

Aside from GitHub doing something dumb here, Paste without formatting belongs as a browser or OS feature, not per-website code.

Great idea with such a script. Do you want to share it?

Sure, it depends on `xclip`, which you might need to install, and `perl` which you probably already have. I only run it while I'm actually copying and pasting as I don't like leaving loops running, that said, with the 1 second sleep it's really not so bad.

  #!/bin/bash
  while true ; do xclip -sel primary -o | perl -pe 'chomp if eof' | xclip -sel primary ; sleep 1 ; done

Note that this affects only the primary selection, e.g. the copy-on-highlight and paste-on-middle-click clipboard. I hardly ever use the rodent, but when I do, this is what I use it for. You could easily adapt the script to the Ctrl-C Ctrl-V clipboard.

> Hide it in some hidden flag

Google is deeply philosophically opposed to doing that. Power users are a distraction from the billions of normal users.

Then make it a regular option. My point was that _if_ it's not deemed important enough to expose a UI option for, at least let make it possible some other way.

macOS has "paste as plaintext" instead.

I’ve remapped ⌘V on my work laptop to paste as plain text which works great everywhere except Outlook, which disables that in email metadata (recipients, subject).

So bloody annoying, thanks Microsoft for continuing to make my life harder than it needs to be.

Better than Gmail which automatically parses text on paste, and, as the cherry on top, even when it recognizes that and alerts on a failed parse (making a red chip), refuses to let you edit the text to fix it.