How to Paste Without Formatting on a Mac

Copy a sentence from a website into an email and you often get a different font, a grey background, odd spacing and a stray link. The fix is to paste the text without its formatting, and on a Mac that's one shortcut in most apps.

The universal shortcut: Paste and Match Style

⌥ ⇧ ⌘ V pastes just the text and applies the formatting already in use where your cursor is. You'll find it in the Edit menu of most apps as Paste and Match Style. If an app's Edit menu doesn't list it, that app doesn't support it; use one of the methods below.

App-by-app

Menus change between app versions. If a shortcut doesn't work, look in the app's Edit menu for anything mentioning "match style", "plain text" or "without formatting".

Make plain-text paste the default in every app

If you almost never want formatting, you can make ⌘ V itself do Paste and Match Style, in every app that has the command:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard and click Keyboard Shortcuts…
2. Choose App Shortcuts and click +.
3. Leave Application as All Applications.
4. For Menu Title, type Paste and Match Style exactly as it appears in menus.
5. Click the Keyboard Shortcut field and press ⌘ V. Click Done.

Apps that have a "Paste and Match Style" command will now use it for ⌘ V; apps without it keep their normal paste. To undo it, remove the shortcut from the same list.

Trade-off: you'll lose formatting when you do want it, such as pasting a table or a formatted paragraph between documents. Many people prefer to keep ⌘ V as it is and learn the three-key version.

Other ways to strip formatting

• Go through TextEdit. Open a new TextEdit document, choose Format → Make Plain Text (⇧ ⌘ T), paste, then copy again. The text is now clean.
• Use the address bar. Paste into your browser's address bar and copy it back out. It's quick for a single line, but loses line breaks.
• Terminal. pbpaste | pbcopy rewrites the clipboard as plain text only.

Why formatting comes along in the first place

When you copy, the app puts several versions of the selection on the clipboard at once: rich text or HTML with the fonts and links, and a plain-text version. The app you paste into picks the richest version it understands. Paste and Match Style tells it to take the plain text instead.

Paste the same text again later

If you strip formatting from the same things over and over (a boilerplate reply, an address, a disclaimer), it's quicker to save them once and paste them with a shortcut. EasyPaste can keep clips like these pinned in your history, or give them a short trigger like ;address that expands wherever you type it. See text expansion on a Mac.