Who came up with this? It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would want to transplant styling/formatting into an email, where there is no guarantee (indeed, little chance) that it will mesh well. It's just baffling.
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...
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.
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...
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 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 no longer an issue, clients mostly seem to handle it without issue.
Rich paste annoys me most when the content I paste has a different notion of what plain paragraph words should look like. And "ctrl-shift-v" isn't helpful if you're trying to paste in a list or something.
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 R or Python, and it's much easier to paste some output from there into excel and do some nice formatting quickly rather than coding it all in a way that would make it production-ready.
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 the screen you can place your mouse that _doesn't_ do that. What does it say? Oh, it just repeats the name of the link it's over".
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.
I feel like it has been like this, at least on Windows, for more than 10 years. I remember working on projects in highschool, copying data from the browser to Microsoft Word and having to remove formatting.
I feel like this worked sensibly until maybe 5 years ago.
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.
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 irritating all programmers evidently find this, i would really love to read a detailed writeup of this feature; its history, how popular it really is, how people use it, etc. It seems likely there's a big story here we're all completely missing.
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.
Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.
1. Most of the people on this thread that want default text.
2. People that carefully format documents.
3. Idiots.
If you have, the answer becomes crystal clear, very quickly: A staggering amount of information gets passed around by people copying random websites into word documents and just needing them to make visual sense without additional effort, because if that was not the case productivity would absolutely plummet, over people fighting to format documents back into readability (or maybe they would just go right back to screenshotting or gasp prints).
Going in the other direction, trying to select and copy a single line from a chat message will copy the entire message. Who even comes up with features like this?
Everything about Windows and Microsoft office is annoying to someone who knows how to use a computer properly; unfortunately, the vast majority of people using them do not. I work with people who use Excel every day and will still do the maths in their head and type into the cells because formulas are too difficult for them to master.
A perfectly acceptable way of using a computer properly is getting one’s task done with the least amount of hassle.
Since MacOS and, to some extent, iOS copy formatting as well, there seems to be some agreement that it’s the behavior that leads to less hassle for the l^Huser.
I'd then suggest that formatting that always conveys meaning (bold, italics, etc) should be copy/pasted.
On the other hand, formatting that often doesn't convey meaning (font face, foreground color, background color, shadows, etc) should not be copied by default.
A three-way option to system-wide (and per application) configure the behavior for control/command + x/c/v would be nice:
* smart copy/paste (what I just described) as the default
* copy/paste as plain text
* copy/paste with full formattingExcept where you're copying math and all your Greek alphas change to a.
Your smart copy/paste would be great if it is smart enough to infer the right options from context, and update from my subsequent adjustments.
* don't care about the misformatting
* actually want the red font and underlining from the web page they're copying from.
These oft-mentioned mythical users that have opposite expectations from their computer than us are a bit like the Sasquatch. Some say they've seen them, but I still don't believe it. :-)
Also these days clients don't have much of a problem handling things. I don't know exactly when, but at some point I went from not being able to paste excel into an email without it being unusably messy to having it paste nearly perfectly on formatting.
A data point is not a statistic but that's quite a data point for me :D
"Can you show me how to make a chart in Excel again?"
PARC was a magical place back then.
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.
I wish I could speak with the people behind text selection in Microsoft Word and other applications. The selection automatically expands to include additional characters, usually whitespace characters although other junk gets pulled in as well, and is a frustration. The behavior seems incoherent; grabbing extra characters for unfathomable reasons.
When the user expends effort to precisely select something this should be respected, not interpreted as an opportunity to apply whatever heuristic gymnastics someone, somewhere for some reason thought was a good idea.
Mail supports rich text, so that's what's copied.
Agreed though: in the scenario you describe, it's often not what's desired, but that's why there's another key combination to support this use case without breaking the consistency of the general paradigm.
I get you, my emails are plain text by default, but this is a relatively straightforward answer. Microsoft has been using rich text pasting since the 90s, I think. It was definitely considered a big feature in that era.
I would say it's usually 50/50 whether I want to keep the formatting or not. But either way most applications support both copy with formatting and copy without formatting.
Yes, this "cloud clipboard" thing is off, verbatim copy is on. i have no idea why on earth they do this, but there is some three dots overlay popping up after selecting text.
I have no plugins or similar installed. It drives me crazy.
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 formatting, like for instance when you just want to quote some passage of text, without quoting its 24 point font.
It is essential to have a command to paste without formatting. You need it both ways.
In 2022, can't you get an e-mail program whose editor has paste with and without formatting?
It's even more of a disaster on a Mac, because the handling is MS Office is much worse than on Windows, and Outlook has about three total settings on its preference screen, so there's no way (I can tell) to change the default behavior.
If you're willing to try a menubar app: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1611378436
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 already have developed muscle memory for Notepad.
Also, who decided that pasting w/ format should be the default behavior, sorry but, wtf.
Is there any real use case for this? Anyone finds this useful? Any scenario where this is actually useful and I'm missing it because I'm not familiar with X?
Not really. For lists it may make some sense, but then if it brings the bullet style/spacing/etc from the source it still wouldn't work for me.
Then I found this neat little program [1] that will paste without formatting for you with a single hotkey.
To me, the real problem is that when you don't want to bring formatting along, it's not obvious how to do that, and it's not implemented universally. Fix that, and I don't think there'd be as much to complain about.
I almost never appreciate this feature but I can comprehend why it exist and it'd be extremely awkward for users that rely on it if it didn't.
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.
The insane perversion comes from copying from VSCode where you get even the background colour?!?! Or the fun thing that copying formatting sometimes works from Linux running in Virtualbox...
It was annoying before I learned this trick; I had been using Notepad instead to strip formatting.
With the shortcut, this is fine for me for most apps.
What drives me barking, raving, drooling mad is the fact that it is possible for an app to lock the clipboard. Bad apps will silently cause the clipboard to fail to update, which leads to the attentive interrupting their work to go back and re-copy. The less attentive, this leads to them sending a message they did not intend to send!
Bad apps locking the clipboard have been around for a long time now, but seem to have been becoming more common lately. As near as I can tell the locking behavior started with Windows 7, but may have actually been Vista (I never used Vista for my day-to-day work, just test environment).
Also, I use Typinator, and have assigned an abbreviation to paste as plain text. Text expansion tools are indispensable.
Every so often I wonder how much data is lost by copying over the copy and then finding the initial copy is gone.
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?
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.
Computing today is meant for the general public. Remember WYSIWYG? Same principles apply here.
You can turn off.
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28478/copy-and-paste-in-outl...
Ctrl+Shift+V doesn't even show up in the Shortcuts config, despite working in every program I've tried and Ctrl+V being in the list.
alias noformat="pbpaste | pbcopy"I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this reason, why the hell would that be the norm?
Who decided links are part of styling and should be filtered out when you past without styling?!
When people ask me why I like my CLI and TUI apps so much this is the example I give. It's much less likely that some UI/UX person has been involved and this means the the workflow will be logical and oriented to the task at hand.