Maybe we just need a simple way to turn this behavior on/off at the operating system level? Clearly, there are strong arguments for both sides.
Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
131–140 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#132Earlier 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...
> If only there was a way to set this as the default and format pasting as the shift setting.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-format...
(MS Office requires a slightly different procedure: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/287159/is-there-a-...)
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#133Outlook used the (still uses? dunno) Wingding font to display smiley faces. To be able to copy paste that would mean copying the formatting as well. Not sure if that's the original reason for it, but it's definitely a use of this. Lots of users would be confused to see their smiley faces turn into "J"s.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.
formatting comes with it. I do a lot of formatting to make things more user friendly & readable. Otherwise it just looks like a wall of text & numbers. Edit: my preference, if it's something that has to be reusable, is to do all of this sort of thing with tools that make the end result self-service & automated. But there's a lot of one-off work too, and more complex analysis usually takes place in a stats program or…
That's why the option exists. But a vast majority of the cases, it's harmful, not helpful, so it shouldn't be the default.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#135Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#136Thank you for this!!! I’m sick and tired of seeing emails with 4 different fonts/style/formatting. I hate stupid Microsoft programs (I’m looking at you Outlook and Teams) that insist on copying all the stupid info from a message. I have no problem with copying the style, but they should use a new key or option for it. Leave copy paste as it is (yeah I know about paste special and paste text only and almost all other tricks mentioned here).
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#137It seems most of my posts here end up being a complaint about MS Teams. So here is another. Teams will happily take the formatting of "black text" from copying from Word for example. But anyone who is using a dark theme on Teams now can't read it because it "intelligently" kept the formatting that didn't even matter because it was just "plain back text". Had it been copied from something that didn't specify that form…
It also brings over "On 13:05pm on 5/2/2010, linuxdaemon said:"
And removes lines and leading spaces. Turns colons into emoji....
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#138Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
formatting comes with it. I do a lot of formatting to make things more user friendly & readable. Otherwise it just looks like a wall of text & numbers. Edit: my preference, if it's something that has to be reusable, is to do all of this sort of thing with tools that make the end result self-service & automated. But there's a lot of one-off work too, and more complex analysis usually takes place in a stats program or…
That's why the option exists. But a vast majority of the cases, it's harmful, not helpful, so it shouldn't be the default.
Oh, definitely. Folks that say there isn't a frequent use case for format pasting are simply working under different conditions. But while I use it frequently, it's probably more common for me to just want plain text and I would prefer that to be the default.
Re: Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
#140In 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...
> In many, but not all programs on windows you can paste plain text by using ctrl+shift+v. Sometimes that trick just stops working for no reason at all, then there's nothing else for it but to paste into notepad.exe and re-copy.
Just to kind of address the Outlook issue, you can also set the default paste setting to be text only. (sigh) we have to do this.