HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who decided copy+paste should copy styling/formatting?

277 points by unbroken ↗ HN
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.

186 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] thread
xcambar
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
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. :-)

xcambar
My family. Their friends.

A data point is not a statistic but that's quite a data point for me :D

xcambar
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
I work with them every day and it's a real struggle :'-)

"Can you show me how to make a chart in Excel again?"

ineedasername
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.

luxeo223
Ctrl-Shift-V pastes without formatting in most applications
Someone1234
Not most applications, a handful of applications. The receiving application itself has to implement it as custom logic.
luxeo223
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.
tlb
Command-option-shift-V in Safari. A real finger-twister.
egypturnash
cmd-opt-shift-v works on any well-behaved OSX application, not just in Safari.
msbarnett
You can remap “paste-and-match-style” to command-v globally, thankfully.
ianferrel
Unfortunately if you do so it will break Cmd-V paste on applications that don't have that feature.
groffee
Just paste it into notepad/gedit/plain text editor first, then recopy it from there.
Kuraj
OP probably know about this, they're just making a point that this should be default behavior.
sophacles
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.

aeyes
Is there any plain text editor shipped with MacOS?
jonsen
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."

knoebber
I sometimes copy paste things into the browser URL bar to strip formatting
tablespoon
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.

terom
Does that mean that you leak it out over DNS / Google search for autocomplete?
Digit-Al
Why not just use ctrl-alt-v to paste without formatting? Or right-click and select "paste special", then select "plain text"?
yubiox
I keep a terminal with vim open, almost every time I copy I paste there and recopy. So stupid and annoying.
lfkdev
strg+shift+v
NegativeLatency
My clipboard manager (flycut) also strips formatting which is really handy
bombledmonk
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...

ZeWaka
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
Fucking Microsoft. Why can't things be simple and standardized?
naikrovek
backwards compatibility.

people who have been using those applications for decades do not want those shortcuts to change for any reason.

unbalancedevh
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.
naikrovek
they did think of that...

you'll be happy to know that a lot of the ribbon is going away in favor of small buttons with icons on them, and people are losing their minds over it. so no matter what Microsoft do, millions of people are gonna bitch about it and complain for years and years.

rhino369
In word, Cntrl Shift V just applies formatting. You have to Ctrl V wait hit Cntrl again and then hit T.
haltcase
And then there's Excel, where you need to do the same but it's Control + V instead of Control + T.
Too
In Excel you can press F2 before pasting. That takes focus of the cell one level deeper to the input-box, where only plain text is allowed.
kleiba
Yes, but you can make it work as described by changing a setting in Word.
icelancer
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.
bryanrasmussen
On Mac you can do shift+option+command+v to paste with formatting removed.
tbrock
I think you just need to add shift, option is not necessary.
kennywinker
Option was required in every app I've ever tried this in... do you somehow have different keybindings than me?
Foivos
Maybe it is related to the language of the keyboard.
olalonde
I just tried in Gmail and cmd-shift-v worked.
spookthesunset
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...
dwaite
Chrome does not use the system-wide key shortcut but defines their own.
jtbayly
Except Chrome, which is often where people are using gmail.
wintermutestwin
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...

olalonde
I used to paste to use the URL bar to paste without formatting and copy again. This is a game changer.
bryanrasmussen
hah you're right, I don't know why I had that option in there, maybe snuck into my muscle memory from something else.

maybe it was in one of the older macs I had to use recently, or some combination with voiceover that I was running.

barbazoo
That's guitar barre chord level difficulty
vandahm
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
Thank you! I will now use pbpaste|pbcopy
SpelingBeeChamp
Not if you assign it a hotkey in Keyboard Maestro :)

On my MacBook Pro, Command + Option + V universally executes the following AppleScript:

  use scripting additions
  do shell script "pbpaste | pbcopy"
  return
antifa
I wish MSTeams supported ancient well established UI/UX conventions, this one most of all.
haxorito
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
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
I often copy to Notepad on Windows, but careful, some characters get silently dropped.
s0rce
I hate outlook blocking that. No idea why you would implement that not working.
hanoz
> 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
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
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
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.
soheil
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
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
I also do this sometimes: cmd+tab, cmd+l, cmd+v, cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+z, cmd+tab

Fewer pages blinking away

astolarz
In Outlook, go to Options > Mail > Editor Options > Advanced > Cut, Copy, Paste > change the drop downs for the various scenarios to "Keep Text Only" to always strip formatting.
mhdhn
It's worse in the smartphone world, at least on iOS. There isn't any notion of paste-plain-text. If I want that, eg in Mail app, I have to use the app Plain Text. It feels like crap.
nend
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
agreed, like others I often resort to using notepad to remove all styling then copy/paste again.
pinacarlos90
Plain text copy/paste should be the default and crtl+shift+v to include formatting
eoghann
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
> 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.

twic
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.

moralestapia
>the vast majority of users want to paste with formatting

Oh, I highly doubt this is the case.

InitialLastName
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
Within the same application and document, it can make sense. That's not what people are raging about though.
bee_rider
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
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.
lucisferre
I think you overestimate the majority of users' ability to make good UX decisions.
Nuzzerino
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
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.
twic
On what basis do you doubt it?
asoneth
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.

freitasm
And recently sometimes ctrl-shift-v seems to not work in any application.
moralestapia
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
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
>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.

marssaxman
If you are editing a text document, you will likely want to move pieces of it around. In the context of WYSIWYG document creation, styling information is part of the content; having to re-apply the style settings every time you moved the text would be annoying.
FabHK
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.

ineedasername
>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.

boardwaalk
Copying a table is one thing, copying font style is another, I think.
ineedasername
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
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
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
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.
Steltek
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
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.
ghusto
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".

zeven7
> 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.

ghusto
Me too. I finally settled on disabling it, but having it trigger with a keyboard shortcut.
Sakos
IDEA does this too. It's infuriating.
tablespoon
> 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
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.

tablespoon
> 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.

You're probably right. Copy-pasting styles wasn't quite so annoying with RTF email, and it really only started getting infuriating for me when browsers and web apps started to try to do it.

nemothekid
>"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.

marssaxman
It always has been like this- as far as my experience goes, anyway: I clearly remember styled copy & paste in the classic Macintosh operating system, all the way back in 1985.
Kozmik1
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!
pupppet
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
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
pupppet
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...
stevesimmons
> 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
The smart thing to do would be to convert it to α. (Or type that in the first place?)
xigoi
Why would you use a different font for Greek letters???
mohamez
THIS!

I hate myself each time I'm using LibreOffice just for this reason, why the hell would that be the norm?

linuxdaemon
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
Does making the background in Word white and not just "default" fix this?
linuxdaemon
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
It also brings over "On 13:05pm on 5/2/2010, linuxdaemon said:"
marcosdumay
And removes lines and leading spaces. Turns colons into emoji....
antifa
Remembers all unwanted formatting, forgets all desired formatting, every single time.
Too
Mmmmmm, MS Teams... Don't get me started. Try pasting a code snippet into MS Teams, it will happily remove all the indentation - even if you paste it in a code block! Extra good luck with yaml. Some people at work now started taking screenshots when sharing small snippets to work around this nonsense.

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?

mattkevan
Teams is a complete tire-fire and I despise using it. Even by Microsoft's standards it's laughably bad.
fredsmith219
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.
Hamcha
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?