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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?

#51

Post by AyyWS »

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 is the one time keeping format is useful. I still frequently have to paste a table or graph as an image, because it still changes on paste.

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

#52

Post by TurkishPoptart »

ZeWaka wrote: post #20
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 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.

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

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

#53

Post by bee_rider »

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 copying over, for example, a paragraph or a list for a paper, you'd want the formatting, right? (I don't really have a horse in this fight, primarily use LaTeX for this sort of stuff, but I find it vaguely interesting -- it seems to be a case where people have workflows that they are really invested in).

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

#54

Post by Hamcha »

I'd wager there's enough people, but I never looked into it so I have no data other than the people I know IRL.

I will add something though, I don't think the other way lends itself too well to being "discoverable". I just had my brother copy some data across documents with different formatting and he didn't know that "paste without formatting" was ever an option and now I think, if it ever worked the other way around, would I ever know that "Paste with formatting" is an option if the app defaults to unformatted paste?

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

#55

Post by haxorito »

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...

I’d say it’s all backwards default copy-paste should be just text and then you can go overboard with adding +shift to combination or +alt

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

#57

Post by pavlov »

Trying to literally answer your question of who came up with this:

I'm pretty sure Windows 95 already allowed rich text on the clipboard (using the RTF format), and at least Word and Excel both supported it. Mac OS X also had RTF support from the start.

Nowadays most desktop applications write HTML to the clipboard instead of RTF, I believe. And that's how the formatting ends up in your Gmail editor inside a browser.

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

#58

Post by rhino369 »

ZeWaka wrote: post #20
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 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.

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

#59

Post by mohamez »

ghusto wrote: post #44
InitialLastName wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're moving sections around in a spreadsheet or a word processor, would it be more annoying if the copy/paste kept the formatting or stripped the formatting?

Within the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.

Exactly!

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

#60

Post by zeven7 »

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…

> useless mouse over popups all over a UI

I go back and forth on whether I want to disable intellisense and tips in VS Code because half the time I feel like it's helpful, but the other half of the time it's covering up other code I need to reference to finish typing.

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