How to paste without formatting on macOS
You can do this with Paste My. One shortcut takes the styling off whatever is on your clipboard, wherever you are, so the next paste arrives as characters.
You copy a paragraph from a web page and paste it into a document, and it arrives wearing the web page's font, the web page's colour and the web page's line spacing. Now you are not writing, you are cleaning up.
Some apps offer a way to paste unformatted. Many do not, they all use different names for it, and remembering which is which per app is its own small tax.
Paste My solves it at the other end. Instead of asking each app to paste differently, it changes what is on the clipboard — so every subsequent paste, in every app, is already plain.
Paste it as plain text
Copy the text as you normally would
Press ⌘C wherever the text is. Nothing special happens yet — you have styled text on your clipboard, exactly as before.
The clipping is also saved to your history at this point, still styled. That matters for step three.
Press ⇧⌘C
That is the whole operation. Whatever is on the clipboard is re-copied as plain text, with every trace of styling removed.
You do not have to be in any particular app, and no window opens. It works from wherever you happen to be standing.
This works on whatever is on the clipboard right now, whether you copied it a second ago or restored it from your history a minute ago.
Paste with ⌘V
The text arrives as characters. No fonts, no colours, no sizes, no inherited line height — it takes on whatever the destination already uses.
Because the clipboard itself is now plain, every paste after this is plain too. Paste it into five places and all five are clean.
The styled original is still there
Stripping the clipboard does not touch your history. The clipping you copied in step one is still there with its formatting intact.
So if it turns out you wanted the styled version after all, press ⇧⌘V, select it and press ⌘↩. Nothing was lost by flattening.
Your history, newest at the top. The sources list is on the left; each entry carries a badge for the kind of thing it is.
The four places this saves the most time
- Web to document. The classic case. A quotation, a paragraph of research, an address from a business's contact page — all of it arrives styled and none of it should be.
- Email to email. Quoting somebody's message into a new one drags their font and colour along, and then your reply has two typefaces in it.
- Spreadsheet to text. Cells carry their own formatting. Flatten first and you get the values instead of a table trying to reassemble itself.
- Anywhere with no Paste and Match Style. Plenty of apps simply do not offer it. This works regardless, because it is the clipboard that changed, not the app.
There is a related case worth knowing: rich text in your history can be flattened to plain text from the entry itself, so you can keep the styled original and take a plain copy of it whenever you want one.
Three more that work the same way
⇧⌘C is one of four shortcuts that act on the clipboard itself rather than inside a window. They all follow the same pattern: they take what is on the clipboard, convert it, and put the result straight back.
| Shortcut | What it does |
|---|---|
| ⇧⌘C | Re-copy whatever is on the clipboard as plain text |
| ⇧⌘L | Copy a link with its tracking parameters stripped out |
| ⇧⌘B | Re-copy the clipboard as Base64 |
| ⌥⇧⌘F | Turn copied path text into real files |
All four leave your history untouched, so converting is never destructive.
If the paste still arrives styled
You pressed it before copying
The shortcut acts on whatever is on the clipboard at the moment you press it. Copy first, then ⇧⌘C, then paste — in that order.
If you copied something else in between, the clipboard has moved on. Press ⇧⌘V, restore the clipping you wanted, then flatten it.
The destination is adding its own styling
Some editors apply their own formatting to whatever arrives — a heading style at the cursor, an automatic list, a code block. That is the destination styling plain text, not styling surviving the strip.
The giveaway is that the result matches the destination rather than the source.
What you copied is not text
Flattening applies to text. An image or a file has no styling to remove, so the shortcut has nothing to do with it.
If you copied a file and wanted its path as text instead, that is a different job — copying files records the plain text of their paths alongside the files themselves.
Questions people ask
Does this change the original document?
No. It changes what is on your clipboard. The document you copied from is untouched, and the styled clipping stays in your history.
Does it work in every app?
It works on the clipboard rather than inside an app, so what you paste is plain wherever you paste it — including apps that have no unformatted-paste command.
Can I get the formatting back afterwards?
Yes. The styled clipping is still in your history. Press ⇧⌘V, select it and press ⌘↩ to put the styled version back.
Does it strip line breaks too?
It removes styling — fonts, colours, sizes and the rest. The text itself, including its line structure, is what you copied.
What about links inside the text?
Link styling goes with everything else. If what you want is a clean URL rather than clean prose, ⇧⌘L copies a link with its tracking parameters stripped out instead.
Is there a way to do this automatically for one app?
Rules can act on clippings as they are captured — pin them, hide them, add them to a collection, redact them or clean tracking from links — so a lot of the tidying you would otherwise do by hand can be set once.
Does it work on text I restored from my history?
Yes. The shortcut acts on whatever is on the clipboard, so a styled clipping you just restored can be flattened straight afterwards.
Will it remove emoji or special characters?
No. It removes styling — fonts, colours, sizes, spacing. The characters themselves are what you copied.
Get Paste My
Free on the Mac App Store. Everything you copy, kept on your Mac and ready the instant you need it again.