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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?

#181

Post by marssaxman »

moralestapia wrote: post #33

Thank you for posting this, I wanted to ask HN about it sometime. I have no clue why somebody thought this was a good idea. In 20 years of using computers everyday, I have never, EVER, had the need to copy the source format into whatever thing I'm doing. On the contrary, every single time I open Notepad, paste it there and copy it again ... I know about ctrl+shift+v or something, but I never get it right and also I a…

If you are editing a text document, you will likely want to move pieces of it around. In the context of WYSIWYG document creation, styling information is part of the content; having to re-apply the style settings every time you moved the text would be annoying.

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

#182

Post by naikrovek »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #149
naikrovek wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they did think of that...

you'll be happy to know that a lot of the ribbon is going away in favor of small buttons with icons on them, and people are losing their minds over it. so no matter what Microsoft do, millions of people are gonna bitch about it and complain for years and years.

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

#183

Post by rootusrootus »

K7PJP wrote: post #154
rootusrootus wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a similar workaround in MacOS. I've gotten quite used to putting things in Sublime as an intermediate step to strip formatting, I'd love to be able to skip that.

Edit ‣ Paste and Match Style is available in most applications. You can assign it to a keyboard shortcut if it's not assigned to one in the app you're using. Also, I use Typinator, and have assigned an abbreviation to paste as plain text. Text expansion tools are indispensable.

> Typinator

Thanks for the tip, I'm going to check that out.

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

#184

Post by mattkevan »

linuxdaemon wrote: post #46

It 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…

Teams is a complete tire-fire and I despise using it. Even by Microsoft's standards it's laughably bad.

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

#186

Post by mhdhn »

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...

It's worse in the smartphone world, at least on iOS. There isn't any notion of paste-plain-text. If I want that, eg in Mail app, I have to use the app Plain Text. It feels like crap.

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

#187

Post by ochrist »

In some programs on Windows, you can use Shift + F10 which will bring up a special menu with some options concerning copy and paste. If you can choose 'Insert special ...' from this menu you can now select how you want to insert from the clipboard (works on some versions of Excel and also some browsers). This also seems to work in Linux, but I don't know about Mac.
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