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Quicksilver Trigger, Strip Clipboard Formatting

Sometimes even the best intentions of developers can't account for user preference, and after speaking with many other Mac users, this certainly seems to be the case with OS X's habitual tendency to preserve the formatting of text copied to the clipboard. For example:

I copy text from OmniWeb:

Pasted text before running the trigger:

Pasted text after running the trigger:


Quicksilver maven Dan Dickinson has figured out a sneaky way to strip out this formatting, and has turned the method into a handy Trigger. The trick works by pasting the contents of the clipboard into a terminal shell (where it loses all formatting), and then re-copying the text to the clipboard. For the trigger to work, you must have the Terminal Plugin installed. A full how-to is available on Dan's website.

Sometimes even the best intentions of developers can't account for user preference, and after speaking with many other Mac users, this...
 

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Erdem Üney

Opt+Shift+Cmd+V : four keys but you need three fingers =) Opt+Cmd with the thumb and the rest you will figure out. Also in Mail, Shift+Cmd+V pastes the copied text as quoted text, in case you haven't noticed.

April 29 2007 at 3:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sporobolus

pbpaste | pbcopy is a very old trick, and it falls down on Unicode text; there are half a dozen other ways to do it, not least of which is this AppleScript one-liner (which may also be triggered by Quicksilver):

set the clipboard to (the clipboard as Unicode text)

April 27 2007 at 3:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Joe Cabrera

What I've always done is pasted the clipboard text into the CC field of a new email message then copied it back out again.

April 26 2007 at 1:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ME

in the example, you used Google Doc's and Spreadsheets, with OmniWeb, I love Omniweb, but it doesnt support Google Docs yet, atleast not for me!

April 26 2007 at 8:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chris

Isn't there a danger of side effects here? If the text on the clipboard has paragraph breaks, isn't the terminal going to end up trying to run commands?
e.g. Try it on the next two lines:

say Holy unexpected consequences Batman!
More text here.

I'm sticking to the built in shortcut...
(I can't test the method - away from the Mac for the day)

April 26 2007 at 4:24 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jono

Does anyone know how to select clips from the Quicksilver clipboard history & then paste them as plain text? (i.e. from any of the clips, not just the last one copied).

The method described above only works with the last clip copied to the clipboard (I think).

April 26 2007 at 4:15 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jody

Great for bringing this to my attention, both Dans! A great productivity solution for those of us that copy and paste out of emails and website all day long. I made my hot key Option Command V. Nice and simple. Quicksilver is one of the best apps on the Mac period.

April 26 2007 at 2:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JD

5: Opt+Shift+Cmd+V? holy cow, a four key combination?! I can see why it's not that well known. Heck, I keep forgetting the key codes for doing screen grabs, those are three and four simultaneous keys too, so I just call up Grab instead.

April 25 2007 at 11:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
JD

6: Firefox is known to not use system services, and it is known to be inconsistent with respect to the rest of the Mac ecosystem.

I wish it were better in that respect, but I still use it almost exclusively because the alternatives are so limited with respect to my uses that it makes me feel almost claustrophobic.

April 25 2007 at 11:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
artifex

I just wish pasting would work consistently, especially in Firefox. If I already have something on the clipboard, and i clip something else, sometimes the new copy is ignored, so when i paste, I still get the old clip out. This is in 10.4.9 on both g4 and intel macs. My only solution so far has been to try to use cut instead of copy when the first method fails, as sometimes that works.

April 25 2007 at 10:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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