René Rebe

For some time it always confused, annoyed me that pasted text on Mac OS X always kept the format. For example when text from the web or email is pasted vise versa or elsewhere, e.g. a text editor or word processor. After having some non-matching mess on the screen I usually used “Format -> Make Plain Text” (in Apple Mail) to get rid of all the arbitrary formating mix.

To my surprise I just found out yesterday (on some other news site - I forgot which, now in retrospect it was listed on some this week), it’s actually possible to insert without format: “Edit -> Paste and Match Style” is the innocent menu item that does it! Combined with the really hard, next to impossible to press key binding: “Option + Shift + Apple + v”!!! A combination where even as trained Emacs user my fingers get rather twisted, …

I never gave this specific menu item much attention, because it’s only available in some programs dealing with formated, attributed text and probably because for me the textual description (Paste and Match Style) did nor really ring a bell to actually stand for Without Format or Style.

Anyway, good to know it’s there. No wonder why some news and blog sites explained this week how to make it the default “Paste”, namely via the “Preference -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts” settings.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 11:52 and is filed under Software, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.