How to paste without formatting on a Mac
Copy a paragraph from a web page, paste it into an email, and it arrives with the page's font, size, colour and links. Pasting as plain text drops all of that and keeps only the words. There is one Mac shortcut that works almost everywhere, and a handful of apps that do it their own way.
Updated
The shortcut: Paste and Match Style
- Copy the text as usual with
⌘C. - Click where you want it to go.
- Press
⌥⇧⌘Vinstead of⌘V.
The text takes on the formatting of wherever it lands. In apps that support it, the same command is in the Edit menu as Paste and Match Style: Mail, Notes, Pages, TextEdit and many more.
App by app
| App | How to paste as plain text |
|---|---|
| Google Docs | ⇧⌘V, or Edit → Paste without formatting |
| Microsoft Word | Edit → Paste Special → Unformatted Text, or paste and choose Keep Text Only from the paste options button |
| Pages, Keynote, Numbers | ⌥⇧⌘V |
| Mail, Notes | ⌥⇧⌘V |
| TextEdit | ⌥⇧⌘V, or Format → Make Plain Text (⇧⌘T) to make the whole document plain |
Strip the formatting before you paste
When an app has no plain-text paste of its own, clean the text on the way through:
- Paste into a TextEdit document set to plain text, copy it again, then paste.
- Paste into Safari's address bar, select it and copy it again. The address bar only holds plain text.
- In Terminal,
pbpaste | pbcopyrewrites whatever is on the clipboard as plain text.
Plain text from your clipboard history
In Maclip every clip keeps its original formatting, so a normal paste looks exactly as it did when you copied it. When you want the words alone, open your history with ⌘⇧V, pick the clip, and press ⇧Return instead of Return. Because Maclip strips the formatting before the paste arrives, it works in every app, including the ones above with no plain-text paste of their own.
Questions
Why doesn't ⌥⇧⌘V work in some apps?
Paste and Match Style is a command each app has to support. Word, Google Docs and many web apps use their own shortcut or menu instead.
Can I make plain text the default paste on a Mac?
Not system-wide. Some apps have a setting, such as Word's option to keep text only when pasting from other programs, and Maclip lets you choose plain text for any paste with ⇧Return.