I have been a Macintosh user for almost 15 years (give or take a lapse or two) and I have never wanted to copy and then paste text from one application to another with fonts, style or other formatting information. In order to work around this “feature”, I often have to keep a text editor open just to paste the text into it and then copy and paste it in the application document I originally intended.
There has got to be a better way.
I’m sure there are all manner of utilities that will clear the text formatting or an OSX Service that will do the same. What I’m asking is for is a way to make the system default not use the formatting information when I either use the Cut, Copy or Paste from the Edit menu, or more truly, when my long-trained muscle memory uses the keyboard for such a task.
I will be wonderfully happy if someone can point me to an application that can help. Even better, if there is some system setting that I can tweak that has been hidden from me all these years.
I can’t help, other than to sympathize and nod vigorously in agreement. If it’s any consolation, Windows apps suffer from the same too-clever-by-half problem. Usually there isn’t even a keyboard short cut for “Paste Special…” to get to the unformatted option. Thank heavens for Linux…
Hmmm. I’ve never thought doing this is that big a deal. Most Mac applications have a “Paste and match style” option that does just that. My only gripe is that it isn’t the default action for Command-P. It should be, and there should be an alternate “Paste and preserve style” option. But that’s just me.