Comments on: Let’s Fix Paste!

By: alulkyNuh

alulkyNuh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:52:21 +0000

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By: KeHoeff

KeHoeff — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:58:54 +0000

hey this is a very interesting article!

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:13:25 +0000

I paste into vim. For preference, I use ‘”*p’.

By: Wor

Wor — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:39:45 +0000

Imagine an app (say Word) configured as you suggested, where “Paste” is “paste just the text without formatting”. Then consider this situation:
You want to reorganize a Word document a bit, moving some sections before some others.
Select the section to move.
Copy
Move to where you want them
Paste
Start cursing as all the formatting in the pasted section gets obliterated.
When most word processors were designed, the typical use case for cutting at pasting was move stuff within a document. This might have changed with the web, but I doubt it.
On the other hand, I can’t really think of a situation where, if had had to copy something from the web, that my destination for it would be Word, so I may be biased.

By: mordaxus

mordaxus — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:18:23 +0000

I also use BBEdit as a composing palette. In fact, the tables I created above of key sequences I did in BBEdit.

By: Nancy McGough

Nancy McGough — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:21:50 +0000

Yes, yes I agree that pasting formatting is a PITA. Another solution is to use PTHPasteboard and configure it so that Pasteboards > Pasting > As Plaintext is checked. This setting is available in the free/gratis version of PTHPasteboard.

By: Brons

Brons — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:58:15 +0000

While I do use the TextEdit hack (though with BBEdit, not TextEdit), the other thing I do all the time in browsers, is:
Command-L
Command-V
Command-A
Command-X
Which, since the URL input line is a plain text field strips the formatting. And it’s easy to remember because it uses the Command-VAX command and I’m an old DECkie.
I should probably teach my fingers that Command-LVAX can be achieved by Command-Shift-Option-V. Of course since I swap constantly back and forth between my PowerBook (with a function key) and my iMac (without), I’ll have to type it while looking at the modifier keys, because muscle memory doesn’t work near as well when they keep moving the keys around on you.

By: Derek Slater

Derek Slater — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:11:43 +0000

Brilliant. Is there a petition?

By: Conrado

Conrado — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:56:35 +0000

You can record a macro in Word for “paste special” in text-only mode and assign to a button and/or key.. that’s what I did when using Word.

By: ssp

ssp — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:34:26 +0000

For some purposes I resorted to the TextEdit technique as well (I thought it’s so silly that I must be the only one using it…), but by now I realised that it’s only a few applications where it’s a problem and I remapped the keyboard equivalents to give me correct pasting with Command-V.
Solves the problem for my practical situations at least. And I suppose Word users simply have to suffer a bit more…