Show HN: A simple app to make Ctrl+V paste unformatted text by default (Windows) (opens in new tab)

Personally I wish there was an option to swap the behavior, make it default to unformatted text using Ctrl+V, and Ctrl+Shift+V for formatted text.

This typically only works in Chrome and Chromium-based apps, like MSEdge or Electron-based apps.

Even then, it is not consistent. E.g., in VSCode, Ctrl+Shift+V is a shortcut for markdown preview.

I didn't know that. I've only used shift-ins.

Just a heads up, chrome will phone home the contents of the URL bar. So make sure you only do this in firefox/ungoogled chromium/etc

How do you deal with multi-line text, Notepad? :)

Even if it does, there are people who think that keeping style information is historical inertia, and that, if it were invented today, the default would be to strip style info from the text, moving “paste, keeping text style” to the more complex key combination. I think I agree with them, but fear a bit that some users might never discover that style can be pasted.

(some links showing those people exist: https://havecamerawilltravel.com/photographer/set-paste-matc..., https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/30821/why-doesnt-past..., https://www.houkconsulting.com/2020/01/paste-text-without-fo...)

I thought Ctrl-Shift-V did indeed do that?

Might be app-specific.

There are definitely some cases where I like it:

- Copying links.

- Copying a whole webpage and keeping headings.

- Sometimes keeping bold and italics are nice.

However when you paste something and it just preserves the font (typeface, color and size) of the entire copy it is just annoying.

Overall I think I like it most of the time. Also cook with things like GNOME Terminal's copy-as-html you can copy/past a command log with highlighting which is a killer feature. I also have a browser extension which lets my copy a bunch of Tabs as HTML links (<a href={url}>{title}</a>) which is great for pasting places that support it.

I think the real problem is that there is no universal way to drop back to plain text. Ctrl-Shift-V usually works, but it isn't universal.

This goes back to my idea that we should have Universal Semantic Shortcuts. For example instead of sending Ctrl-v to the app. My desktop environment should handle that and send a Paste event. And Ctrl-Shift-V should universally send a Paste even with just the plain text content.

I think there are a lot of common actions that could be handled like this, and it means that you can remap Paste across all your applications.

Maybe we should take inspiration from Apple and map Super-v to the Paste event and slowly transition. Since few if any Linux apps bind to the Super key (is that even possible?) it would be a good place to add these new Semantic Shortcuts.

Might be one of those legacy poor usability decisions. Still not easy for modern Microsoft to undo, hindered by compatibility concerns and internal bureaucracy.

Same as the infamous "Terminate batch job (Y/N)?" prompt, upon hitting Ctrl+C. Who would every want to continue a .BAT script after trying to stop it? To make it worse, hitting Ctrl+C again cancel that prompt and continues the script. Some lost data because of that.

I was using Notepad too for decades, and now I'm surprised of how quickly I got used to Ctrl+V simply working the way I always wanted it :)

I only know of Unformat Clipboard. Not free.

https://coldx.net/#apps-for-mac

For me, CMD + Shift + V usually works

The app is open-source and you'd actually need to compile it on your own to run it. The repo has simple instructions on how to do that. Thus, you could assess the risk.

This is an interesting idea (if controlled by a setting). I'm afraid though there is no universal approach to implementing it, which would work across all apps.

    crtl + shift + v

Usually works when pasting in text to most sites on Chrome and Firefox

I was a PureText user for over a decade and I lately (with frequent Win10 updates) I was experiencing problems with some apps, like often I heard the beep but nothing was getting pasted. If it still works great for you, naturally there is no need to switch.

There is one useful feature unique to my app (AFAIK), it's Win+Ins for pasting into a command line. It replaces all line breaks with spaces, so nothing gets automatically executed upon pasting.