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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?

#161

Post by twic »

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.

On what basis do you doubt it?

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

#162

Post by soheil »

jhot wrote: post #104
soheil wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any way is to paste inside a non-textrich area like the browser address bar and then immediately copy the content again to get rid of the styling.

I do this all the time. Cmd+tab into browser, cmd+t, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+w, cmd+tab to where I need to paste, cmd+v But now that I've seen you can add shift to remove formatting, I'll have to try to remember to do that instead.

I also do this sometimes: cmd+tab, cmd+l, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+z, cmd+tab

Fewer pages blinking away

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

#165

Post by tablespoon »

toyg wrote: post #150
tablespoon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

You're probably right. Copy-pasting styles wasn't quite so annoying with RTF email, and it really only started getting infuriating for me when browsers and web apps started to try to do it.

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

#166

Post by astolarz »

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...

In Outlook, go to Options > Mail > Editor Options > Advanced > Cut, Copy, Paste > change the drop downs for the various scenarios to "Keep Text Only" to always strip formatting.

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

#167

Post by dwaite »

olalonde wrote: post #122
kennywinker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome does not use the system-wide key shortcut but defines their own.

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

#168

Post by d--b »

At some point in history, rich text formatting was pretty uniform. Copying from word to textpad or outlook just worked.

You definitely wanted to keep what was in italics, bold, superscript and so on, so at least that made sense.

Then why not fonts and colors? From a word document to powerpoint, it makes sense to keep all the formatting.

What messed everything up is the web. You can’t paste anything into gmail without the formatting to be all screwed.

It’s annoying indeed.

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

#169

Post by joeman1000 »

I’m looking at a company… it’s name starts with Micro… I am currently forced to work in excel today and I can’t describe how excruciating it is to do even the simplest things. This may be a ‘spreadsheet thing’, or it may be a MS thing (probably both). Coming from a few hours in emacs into a big-ol’ spreadsheet just shocks my system. I can’t get over how many idiosyncratic and unintuitive things they can cram into one screenful. It’s a feat in mass user torture. I’m going to write a proper post on why no one should use excel, especially if they’re in a technical field.

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

#170

Post by antifa »

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.

I wish MSTeams supported ancient well established UI/UX conventions, this one most of all.
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