Comment by macintux

Comment by macintux 8 hours ago

3 replies

What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.

Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.

The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.

And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.

SoftTalker 8 hours ago

On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.

  • thewebguyd 6 hours ago

    Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.

    I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.

    • SoftTalker 2 hours ago

      Yeah, even easier, SHIFT-CTRL-V on most systems is unformatted. But, I always forget, so pasting is like: CTRL-V -- goddammit -- CTRL-Z; SHIFT-CTRL-V.