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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?

#141

Post by Tagbert »

I’m sure Win/Mac/Lin all support multiple formats in their clipboard that can be requested by the apps upon paste.

To support this should also be standard key combinations that allow the user to paste plain text or rich text as needed. I often want to paste plain text but I’m OK if I need to use an additional modifier for that. I can see reasons why most people expect a rich text result based on history so I don’t think it is worth disrupting that precedent. Those of us, to whom it matters can adapt.

Apps should also provide clipboard controls to chose the paste format. Sometimes there are additional paste types that would be relevant. Some apps, like the MS Office apps do this but it is not universal.

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

#142

Post by kleiba »

rhino369 wrote: post #58
ZeWaka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly annoying in Outlook. Every other Microsoft product I've used like Word supports the key-combo, but of course Outlook has to be different.

In word, Cntrl Shift V just applies formatting. You have to Ctrl V wait hit Cntrl again and then hit T.

Yes, but you can make it work as described by changing a setting in Word.

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

#143

Post by praestigiare »

kazinator wrote: post #113

> Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting? I would say, 1980s integrated office appllications for the Macintosh, like ClarisWorks. > It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email It absolutely makes a ton of sense: often you want to copy text containing bullets, bolding, italics, underlining and ... oh: tables? There are times when you don't want the…

Yes, you can get such an editor, but it is annoying that this is something you cannot rely on the OS to consistently do.

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

#144

Post by conductr »

jimlikeslimes wrote: post #140
hanoz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You have to consider the average user though. They have an image and 4 fonts in their signature, one of which is Comic Sans

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

#145

Post by asoneth »

twic wrote: post #29

At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe... I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting. Given how often this comes up, and how…

I've heard the same, but the story was apocryphal.

Specifically that when they needed to decide which paste style should be the default "Paste" operation it was a combination of user research and a bias towards novice-friendly defaults that led them to pick paste-with-formatting as the default and paste-as-plain-text as the alternative.

I'd also be interested in seeing the actual research and design rationale.

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

#146

Post by Gibbon1 »

moralestapia wrote: post #34
twic wrote: post #29

At least two people want to paste with formatting: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/17398-clipboard-history-fe... I've seen this question asked again and again. Once, i saw an answer from someone who was a product manager on a big office tool, i think at Microsoft. Their answer was that according to their user research, the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting. Given how often this comes up, and how…

>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

I don't doubt they want to. That's not the same as they should. I think actually you have three groups.

  1. Most of the people on this thread that want default text. 
  2. People that carefully format documents.
  3. Idiots.
The first two find copying the style over to be super annoying. Both have to remove it as a second step. The last don't know any better. That latter group is much larger than the first two.

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

#147

Post by rhco »

jimlikeslimes wrote: post #140
hanoz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is one of my many peeves with Outlooks UX. You can do Ctrl+Alt+V, which gives you an option to paste unformatted, but it's much more finger-intensive than the other shortcut.

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

#149

Post by unbalancedevh »

naikrovek wrote: post #80
TurkishPoptart wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fucking Microsoft. Why can't things be simple and standardized?

backwards compatibility. people who have been using those applications for decades do not want those shortcuts to change for any reason.

Haha, I wish they'd thought of that before they implemented the ribbon to replace the menu bar. I can't imagine how many hours of productivity were lost for people dealing with that change.

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

#150

Post by toyg »

tablespoon wrote: post #109
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…

> 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! I feel like this worked sensibly until maybe 5 years ago.

Nah, much much older.

Some tools started to go that way in the '90s. About 15 years ago the "war on email format" ended with the victory of html, and already this behaviour was widespread - Word and Outlook were already working like that by then.

What has changed in the last decade or so is that the "paste as plain text" options are increasingly harder to find, and occasionally have been dropped altogether.

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