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Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

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Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#121

Post by nemothekid »

ghusto wrote: post #38

This! I thought I was going insane, that nobody has mentioned this until now. "When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't! It is mind crushingly annoying, second in nerve-o-smashing only to useless mouse over popups all over a UI. "Here, let me just smack a popup over what you're reading because there's now about 0.2cm of t…

>"When did this start happening?", I thought. But looking into it, it seemed as if it had always been like this -- only of course it hadn't!

I feel like it has been like this, at least on Windows, for more than 10 years. I remember working on projects in highschool, copying data from the browser to Microsoft Word and having to remove formatting.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#122

Post by olalonde »

kennywinker wrote: post #98
tbrock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.

Option was required in every app I've ever tried this in... do you somehow have different keybindings than me?

I just tried in Gmail and cmd-shift-v worked.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#123

Post by stevesimmons »

Willamin wrote: post #90
pupppet wrote: post #43

It's tough because you don't want the formatting...until you. If I'm editing text that has a few bolded words I'd be immediately annoyed if the pasted text didn't have the bolded instances.

Great point! I'd then suggest that formatting that always conveys meaning (bold, italics, etc) should be copy/pasted. On the other hand, formatting that often doesn't convey meaning (font face, foreground color, background color, shadows, etc) should not be copied by default. A three-way option to system-wide (and per application) configure the behavior for control/command + x/c/v would be nice: * smart copy/paste (w…

> font face

Except where you're copying math and all your Greek alphas change to a.

Your smart copy/paste would be great if it is smart enough to infer the right options from context, and update from my subsequent adjustments.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#124

Post by olalonde »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #114
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.

Thanks so much for this - I can't imagine how much time I have wasted jumping through goofy hoops trying to change the formatting in gmail. If only there was a way to set this as the default and format pasting as the shift setting. FWIW, shift+command+v works for me...

I used to paste to use the URL bar to paste without formatting and copy again. This is a game changer.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#126

Post by barbazoo »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #49
bombledmonk wrote: post #16

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work. Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how. https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.

That's guitar barre chord level difficulty

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#127

Post by vandahm »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #49
bombledmonk wrote: post #16

In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Outlook desktop is one of the few places where this hotkey does not work. Before I knew there was a native hotkey combo, I created a autohotkey script that would do that and had a mini-tutorial that showed how. https://forum.digikey.com/t/add-a-digi-key-search-hotkey-eve...

On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.

That's a lot of finger gymnastics, but it's probably better than `pbpaste|pbcopy`, which is how I've been doing it all these years.

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#128

Post by HanyouHottie »

My go-to method to strip formatting was Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A, Ctrl+X (or C), Esc. This opens the run box, pastes the text (without formatting, because it's the run box), selects it, copies it, and closes the run box. It can be done quickly and entirely with the left hand.

Then I found this neat little program [1] that will paste without formatting for you with a single hotkey.

[1]: http://stevemiller.net/PureText/

Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

#129

Post by strongpigeon »

Steltek wrote: post #112
ineedasername wrote: post #36

>It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email I do it all the time when I need to email a small table from excel instead of attaching the whole sheet, especially when it's backed by data that should never be sent in an email. It works fine. I used to not be able to do this. Content didn't paste nicely, or recipient clients didn't display it nicely. These days it's…

This highlights my true desire: I want to copy structure, not specific font choices. Or in other words, I want the HTML tags but not the CSS. Rich paste annoys me most when the content I paste has a different notion of what plain paragraph words should look like. And "ctrl-shift-v" isn't helpful if you're trying to paste in a list or something.

Some of the copying of font style makes a bit more sense if you consider that Outlook used (still use?) Wingding to display smiley faces. Now whether they should have done that in the first place is another question, but for the sake of back compatibility I can see why it's important to keep.
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