[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/f...
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Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?
I don't know if you have noticed that if you copy+paste into email
pages/apps like outlook and gmail they bring over all the
formatting and styling of the source. That is, it pastes the text
in with things like the font color and background color, and the
font type itself, which then become the styling for the rest of the
email if you keep typing as well. 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.
Author : unbroken
Score : 229 points
Date : 2022-05-12 17:10 UTC (5 hours ago)
| RajT88 wrote:
| As some have pointed out, CTRL+SHIFT+V will save you here on
| Windows.
|
| 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).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 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.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Command-option-shift-V or "claw paste" as I call it
| K7PJP wrote:
| 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.
| nautilius wrote:
| It's _amazing_ for job applications if you 're on the receiving
| end: there is no faster shortcut for triaging an application to
| "Deleted Items" than mismatched formatting of my name, or "I am
| really interested in $SOME_SNIPPET_FROM_MY_WEBSITE".
| kurupt213 wrote:
| I agree that copying formatting should be the special case
| instead of copying the text only
| pinacarlos90 wrote:
| Plain text copy/paste should be the default and crtl+shift+v to
| include formatting
| ciabattabread wrote:
| It's threads like this that remind me that this website is a
| niche website.
|
| Computing today is meant for the general public. Remember
| WYSIWYG? Same principles apply here.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| If you have rarely worked with average people in any non-tech-
| producing-but-software-using sector, I can see how this might be
| confusing.
|
| 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).
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| xcambar wrote:
| Many users, and maybe most outside HN, either:
|
| * don't care about the misformatting
|
| * actually want the red font and underlining from the web page
| they're copying from.
| sph wrote:
| They want the red font more often than they just want the text,
| and don't get annoyed when their email now is all in red Impact
| font?
|
| 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. :-)
| ineedasername wrote:
| Hardly sasquatch. It's extremely common where I work. Your
| experience simply isn't representative of the population.
|
| 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.
| xcambar wrote:
| My family. Their friends.
|
| A data point is not a statistic but that's quite a data point
| for me :D
| xcambar wrote:
| In all seriousness, I've worked for many years for a
| company that had as a feature to help clients build
| knowledge bases. Most of it was done by copy/pasting Word
| documents into a web page.
|
| Keeping formatting was our #1 requested feature and most
| demanding task.
|
| So yeah, people want that and companies are built on those
| jot-so-mythical users and their truly-not-mythical money.
| eoghann wrote:
| I work with them every day and it's a real struggle :'-)
|
| "Can you show me how to make a chart in Excel again?"
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think it kinda makes sense when you are using other Office
| tools. Formatting in that case might be something user wants.
|
| 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...
| Kozmik1 wrote:
| It's amazing that Microsoft works so hard on this bs, but does
| zero to have Excel support copying newline separated (or comma
| separated, otherwise clearly dilineated) text pop into Excel
| properly on paste, something that would actually be useful!
| luxeo223 wrote:
| Ctrl-Shift-V pastes without formatting in most applications
| tlb wrote:
| Command-option-shift-V in Safari. A real finger-twister.
| egypturnash wrote:
| cmd-opt-shift-v works on any well-behaved OSX application,
| not just in Safari.
| msbarnett wrote:
| You can remap "paste-and-match-style" to command-v globally,
| thankfully.
| ianferrel wrote:
| Unfortunately if you do so it will break Cmd-V paste on
| applications that don't have that feature.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Not most applications, a handful of applications. The receiving
| application itself has to implement it as custom logic.
| luxeo223 wrote:
| Wouldn't most applications that support rich text input
| inherit it from the browser, the underlying framework for
| native apps and/or be implementing styling themselves already
| (i.e. code editors)? I'm trying to enumerate applications
| that I use and I'm struggling to come up with more than
| Google Sheets, where paste without formatting is a drop-down
| menu instead.
| pupppet wrote:
| It's tough because you don't want the formatting...until you. If
| I'm editing text that has a few bolded words I'd be immediately
| annoyed if the pasted text didn't have the bolded instances.
| Willamin wrote:
| Great point!
|
| 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 formatting
| stevesimmons wrote:
| > font face
|
| Except 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.
| aendruk wrote:
| The smart thing to do would be to convert it to a. (Or type
| that in the first place?)
| pupppet wrote:
| Yep totally agree. The number of times I've pasted into a
| WYSIWYG editor and discovered a mess of nested divs that came
| along for the ride...
| carom wrote:
| I just paste it into the URL bar and re-copy. Ctrl+l, ctrl+v,
| ctrl+a, ctrl+c.
| HanyouHottie wrote:
| My go-to method to strip formatting was Win+R, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+A,
| Ctrl+X (or C), Esc. This opens the run box, pastes the text
| (without formatting, because it's the run box), selects it,
| copies it, and closes the run box. It can be done quickly and
| entirely with the left hand.
|
| Then I found this neat little program [1] that will paste without
| formatting for you with a single hotkey.
|
| [1]: http://stevemiller.net/PureText/
| eoghann wrote:
| I just imagined trying to explain to my non-techy colleagues how
| to get the pasted "stuff" to look like the copied "stuff" and
| that pretty much answered the question...
|
| 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.
| WalterGR wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| mohamez wrote:
| THIS!
|
| I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this
| reason, why the hell would that be the norm?
| kcexn wrote:
| Was this a decision? I thought Copy+Paste would just have copied
| the data in the buffer and paste out the data in the buffer. All
| metadata and stuff attached.
| topspin wrote:
| Copying anything other than the characters/code points/whatever
| _by default_ is a misfeature. Should it be possible to copy
| formatting? Yes, of course, in those rare, specialized cases when
| it 's useful and likely to work in a sane manner. Otherwise it's
| a bad idea.
|
| 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.
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| 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 formatting, it would have just
| worked.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Does making the background in Word white and not just "default"
| fix this?
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| It would make sense that it would if the formatting was
| specified (though MS rarely makes much sense). I can't test
| this myself. I only have access to word online, and (unless
| I'm blind) there is no way to specify background on a
| text/paragraph in the online version.
| bluedino wrote:
| It also brings over "On 13:05pm on 5/2/2010, linuxdaemon said:"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And removes lines and leading spaces. Turns colons into
| emoji....
| kazinator wrote:
| > _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 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?
| praestigiare wrote:
| Yes, you can get such an editor, but it is annoying that this
| is something you cannot rely on the OS to consistently do.
| paxys wrote:
| The OS will actually copy both the raw text and text with
| formatting. It's up to the client app to let you choose which one
| to paste. Most of them offer both ("paste without formatting").
| wasmitnetzen wrote:
| Even in Linux, it's surprisingly hard to make plain pasting the
| default. I once tried to research how to switch the Ctrl+Shift+V
| behaviour with Ctrl+V on KDE, and I gave up after a while.
| Couldn't find a way.
|
| 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.
| ww520 wrote:
| Yes, it's really annoying. In the past I had resorted to
| copy/paste into Emacs and then copy/paste out into the
| destination app. Then I learned about the Ctrl+Shift+V trick and
| just rolled with that.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| I like the option. If I want the formatting stripped I paste the
| text into notepad++, then copy that text. Otherwise I get all the
| formatting and don't need to reapply it.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Obviously not an emacs user... (wink)
| adamrezich wrote:
| Win+R notepad Enter Ctrl+V Ctrl+A Ctrl+X is just embedded in my
| muscle memory at this point and I wish it didn't have to be.
| ledjon wrote:
| 1000% agreed
| bob1029 wrote:
| Maybe we just need a simple way to turn this behavior on/off at
| the operating system level? Clearly, there are strong arguments
| for both sides.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| It makes perfect sense! I guess you didn't know, Cmd-shift-V
| pastes the plain text only, in all or nearly all applications.
| twic wrote:
| 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 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.
| asoneth wrote:
| 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.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting
|
| Oh, I _highly_ doubt this is the case.
| twic wrote:
| On what basis do you doubt it?
| lucisferre wrote:
| I think you overestimate the majority of users' ability to
| make good UX decisions.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| How does that affect whether they will be annoyed or not
| when they paste something and it includes formatting that
| has to be removed?
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| 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?
| ghusto wrote:
| Within the same application and document, it can make
| sense. That's not what people are raging about though.
| mohamez wrote:
| Exactly!
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it depends on your workflow -- I'd tend to assume
| the receiving end has some formatting, and it would be best
| if the copied text was fit that formatting, rather than
| bringing formatting with it. Ultimately though it seems
| pretty arbitrary, I guess they just went with the default
| that benefits what they assumed would be the most popular
| workflow.
|
| I dunno, we should all just use LaTeX to avoid these kinds
| of issues.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| In a spreadsheet or word processor, you have Paste Special
| which allows you to be granular about what formatting, etc
| comes over with the paste.
| freitasm wrote:
| And recently sometimes ctrl-shift-v seems to not work in any
| application.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Paste into Notepad then copy again to get rid of formatting.
| yubiox wrote:
| I keep a terminal with vim open, almost every time I copy I paste
| there and recopy. So stupid and annoying.
| leaflets2 wrote:
| I hit ctrl-f and paste, copy again in the app's search field -
| then the formatting disappears.
| gumby wrote:
| This has been how I remember copy/paste working on the on the
| Alto back in the 1970s. I believe copy/paste was invented by
| Larry Tesler and it wasn't just in the editor (Bravo/Gypsy -- I
| can no longer remember) but worked this way in other programs as
| well.
|
| PARC was a magical place back then.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Outlook used the (still uses? dunno) Wingding font to display
| smiley faces. To be able to copy paste that would mean copying
| the formatting as well. Not sure if that's the original reason
| for it, but it's definitely a use of this. Lots of users would be
| confused to see their smiley faces turn into "J"s.
| Hamcha wrote:
| 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?
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 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?
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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).
| moralestapia wrote:
| >If you are copying over, for example, a paragraph or a list
| for a paper, you'd want the formatting, right?
|
| 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.
| lfkdev wrote:
| strg+shift+v
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| My clipboard manager (flycut) also strips formatting which is
| really handy
| alin23 wrote:
| Yea it's annoying more often than it's useful. As always, there's
| a macOS app for that: https://sindresorhus.com/pure-paste
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| MacOS Classic 6.0 (maybe even earlier) also included formatting
| on the clipboard. Don't think it was rtf in those days though.
| But definitely preserved formatting as early as 1990. Maybe
| earlier.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think this makes perfect sense, but I agree it can be annoying.
| I wouldn't want a copy-paste operation to be lossy by default. If
| I were copying a table or something like that, I would almost
| certainly want that formatting preserved at the destination.
|
| 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.
| groffee wrote:
| Just paste it into notepad/gedit/plain text editor first, then
| recopy it from there.
| sophacles wrote:
| Yeah right. If you just want the obvious basic functionality,
| you just need to do extra steps!
|
| 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.
| Kuraj wrote:
| OP probably know about this, they're just making a point that
| this should be default behavior.
| aeyes wrote:
| Is there any plain text editor shipped with MacOS?
| jonsen wrote:
| TextEdit:
|
| "If there's a format you prefer for new documents, you can
| set the default format. Choose TextEdit > Preferences, click
| New Document, then select "Rich text" or "Plain text" below
| Format."
| renewiltord wrote:
| Cmd-Shift-V and forget about things.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I agree with you 100%.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Thank you for this!!! I'm sick and tired of seeing emails with 4
| different fonts/style/formatting. I hate stupid Microsoft
| programs (I'm looking at you Outlook and Teams) that insist on
| copying all the stupid info from a message. I have no problem
| with copying the style, but they should use a new key or option
| for it. Leave copy paste as it is (yeah I know about paste
| special and paste text only and almost all other tricks mentioned
| here).
| bombledmonk wrote:
| 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...
| s0rce wrote:
| I hate outlook blocking that. No idea why you would implement
| that not working.
| hanoz wrote:
| _> 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.
| jimlikeslimes wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| You have to consider the average user though. They have an
| image and 4 fonts in their signature, one of which is Comic
| Sans
| rhco wrote:
| 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with
| formatting removed.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's guitar barre chord level difficulty
| vandahm wrote:
| That's a lot of finger gymnastics, but it's probably better
| than `pbpaste|pbcopy`, which is how I've been doing it all
| these years.
| solveit wrote:
| Thank you! I will now use pbpaste|pbcopy
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Thanks so much for this - I can't imagine how much time I
| have wasted jumping through goofy hoops trying to change the
| formatting in gmail.
|
| 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...
| em500 wrote:
| > If only there was a way to set this as the default and
| format pasting as the shift setting.
|
| https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/copy-paste-text-without-
| format...
|
| (MS Office requires a slightly different procedure:
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/287159/is-
| there-a-...)
| olalonde wrote:
| I used to paste to use the URL bar to paste without
| formatting and copy again. This is a game changer.
| tbrock wrote:
| I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Option was required in every app I've ever tried this in...
| do you somehow have different keybindings than me?
| jtbayly wrote:
| Except Chrome, which is often where people are using
| gmail.
| Foivos wrote:
| Maybe it is related to the language of the keyboard.
| olalonde wrote:
| I just tried in Gmail and cmd-shift-v worked.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I do command-shift-v all the time too and it works.
| Course maybe the places where it doesn't seem to work are
| the ones that require "option" too... hmm...
| itcrowd wrote:
| It's optional
| soheil wrote:
| 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.
| jhot wrote:
| 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.
| soheil wrote:
| I also do this sometimes: cmd+tab, cmd+l, cmd+v, cmd+a,
| cmd+c, cmd+z, cmd+tab
|
| Fewer pages blinking away
| haxorito wrote:
| 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
| SilasX wrote:
| Oh wow I had always gotten into the habit of copying into a
| simple text editor first if I wanted to strip out the
| formatting.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I often copy to Notepad on Windows, but careful, some
| characters get silently dropped.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| 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.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Fucking Microsoft. Why can't things be simple and
| standardized?
| naikrovek wrote:
| backwards compatibility.
|
| people who have been using those applications for decades
| do not want those shortcuts to change for any reason.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| 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.
| floxy wrote:
| Like the reason ctrl+f in Outlook is to "forward", rather
| than "find".
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=5
| 0...
| icelancer wrote:
| My company switched to Office over Google and this is by far
| the worst thing I've come across, and that's saying a lot.
| rhino369 wrote:
| In word, Cntrl Shift V just applies formatting. You have to
| Ctrl V wait hit Cntrl again and then hit T.
| haltcase wrote:
| And then there's Excel, where you need to do the same but
| it's Control + V instead of Control + T.
| kleiba wrote:
| Yes, but you can make it work as described by changing a
| setting in Word.
| FabHK wrote:
| It seems to me that the general paradigm is that the copy/paste
| operation copies over everything, if the receiving app supports
| it, and degrades gracefully, otherwise. In other words: copy over
| as much as possible.
|
| 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.
| Vosporos wrote:
| The Devil.
| standardly wrote:
| ctrl+shift+v
| wnissen wrote:
| Rich text is high-entropy, plain text is strictly lower entropy.
| If you lose the painstakingly applied formatting, you'll be sad,
| at least sadder than you were if you had to reset the formatting,
| which is comparatively easy.
|
| 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.
| nend wrote:
| It's useful if you want to copy, say a bulleted list over, or
| keep various bold/italicized words.
|
| 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.
| hitgeek wrote:
| agreed, like others I often resort to using notepad to remove all
| styling then copy/paste again.
| more_corn wrote:
| Idiots
| lostlogin wrote:
| Another issue with copy + paste is that history isn't preserved.
| Why a clipboard manager isn't a piece of the OS is a mystery to
| me.
|
| Every so often I wonder how much data is lost by copying over the
| copy and then finding the initial copy is gone.
| Tomte wrote:
| It gets worse: on Microsoft Edge I have to wait half a second or
| so after selecting text before I press Ctrl-C. If I try to copy
| too fast it won't copy.
|
| 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.
| superjan wrote:
| This is mostly the office team deciding that this is useful.
| Probably to provide a consistent experience when copying between
| apps within the suite.
|
| You can turn off.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/28478/copy-and-paste-in-outl...
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> 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 no
| longer an issue, clients mostly seem to handle it without issue.
| Steltek wrote:
| This highlights my true desire: I want to copy structure, not
| specific font choices. Or in other words, I want the HTML tags
| but not the CSS.
|
| 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.
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Some of the copying of font style makes a bit more sense if
| you consider that Outlook used (still use?) Wingding to
| display smiley faces. Now whether they should have done that
| in the first place is another question, but for the sake of
| back compatibility I can see why it's important to keep.
| boardwaalk wrote:
| Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I
| think.
| ineedasername wrote:
| formatting comes with it. I do a lot of formatting to make
| things more user friendly & readable. Otherwise it just looks
| like a wall of text & numbers.
|
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's why the option exists. But a vast majority of the
| cases, it's harmful, not helpful, so it shouldn't be the
| default.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Oh, definitely. Folks that say there isn't a frequent use
| case for format pasting are simply working under
| different conditions. But while I use it frequently, it's
| probably more common for me to just want plain text and I
| would prefer that to be the default.
| AyyWS wrote:
| 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.
| pengo wrote:
| The clipboard data format for copying and pasting is determined
| by whoever wrote the software. Some software allows for format
| conversion of copied data at the point of pasting; again, that's
| a decision made by the software provider.
| swah wrote:
| Conclusion: the majority of HN never saw how a non-technical
| person uses a computer.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| On a Mac, copying text from my terminal to Outlook, or to Excel,
| copies in formatting too. A little frustrating when you copy text
| from a dark mode theme into a non-dark mode theme and it looks
| like nothing was copied at all because its all just 'white'.
| ghusto wrote:
| 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 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".
| tablespoon wrote:
| > 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.
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| zeven7 wrote:
| > 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.
| Sakos wrote:
| IDEA does this too. It's infuriating.
| ghusto wrote:
| Me too. I finally settled on disabling it, but having it
| trigger with a keyboard shortcut.
| nemothekid wrote:
| >"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 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| If copy-paste didn't copy formatting it'd be impossible to copy
| formatting without a special other interaction - it's usually
| easy enough to get around this behavior by either using
| ctrl+shift+v or else paste into a plain text editor and copy out
| of there.
|
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| More importantly:
|
| Who decided links are part of styling and should be filtered out
| when you past without styling?!
| knoebber wrote:
| I sometimes copy paste things into the browser URL bar to strip
| formatting
| calvano915 wrote:
| I use notepad
| someweirdperson wrote:
| I use the outlook subject line.
| terom wrote:
| Does that mean that you leak it out over DNS / Google search
| for autocomplete?
| tablespoon wrote:
| Me too. Copy-pasting with formatting is almost always what I
| _don 't_ want.
|
| 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.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...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
| Digit-Al wrote:
| Why not just use ctrl-alt-v to paste without formatting? Or
| right-click and select "paste special", then select "plain
| text"?
| Vladimof wrote:
| I usually paste it in an edit box that doesn't accept formatting
| list Firefox's search box and copy and paste again to get rid of
| stupid formating... but I agree that this shouldn't be the
| default
| erellsworth wrote:
| It was me. Sorry, my bad.
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