Why Paste without Style is Better
A lot of programs these days paste-with-style by default. This is really annoying and, IMHO, bad design.
In reality, it’s rare that I style text. I almost always use the default style of the editor I’m writing in. This is true for just about everyone as well. Most poeple write way more unstyled words in a day than they do styled.
Unfortunately, when I paste text, the destination editor uses the inherited default style of the source editor. Generally the two editors have different default styles, so my new block of text looks out of place.
Instead, I’d like the destination editor to recognize my text not as “Times New Roman 12” but as “unstyled.” In times when I specifically have applied a style, it would be handy to have that moved over. Best of all would be a CSS-like implementation: the destination editor recognizes exactly which style attributes I’ve chosen and adopts them. So, for example, it recognizes I’ve bolded text and made it 14pt, but haven’t specifically chosen a typeface, so it uses its default typeface at 14pt bold.
Even given that this isn’t a workable idea, I still favor pasting unstyled by default over styled. It’s very rare that I the style in the source editor will fit aesthetically with the destination editor. Inevitably I’ll have to tweak the text style somehow to get it to flow with the rest of my destination document.
I still support including a “Paste with Style” option below the regular “Paste,” just don’t bind it to Cmd-V.
