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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

I've never wanted to maintain formatting while pasting. This is probably one of the most annoying default behaviors I've ever encountered.

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I mean, I always do within the same app. If I've moving a section of a document in Word from one place to another, you can be sure I want to preserve everything.

However, I agree with you a billion percent between apps. I'm sure I've copied text from a webpage into a document 10,000 times, and not a single time have I ever wanted the font or size or color preserved.

Just think it's an important distinction to preserve.

Also I can't be the only person who almost never copies in an editor, but cuts and pastes back into place (so I can visually verify the copy.) It would be very frustrating if ctrl or cmd +X, V didn't restore the document to its original state.

I've never heard of that. Why do you do that? What's to verify? When has a copy ever gone wrong? I feel like I'm missing something because I don't understand it at all.

I do that too, I'm not sure why, but I'd guess it has something to do with the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it. I would guess that is just my way of checking that the clipboard is working like I assumed it would, because the behavior of copying and pasting isn't always consistent between different text boxes. More than anything, it's just a habit.

> the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it

I will say, sometimes I do find myself wondering whether something was copied as plain text or as formatted text, or whether I pasted the previous thing before going to copy another.

I really like what Apple has done with screenshots — a thumbnail hovers in a pop-up window in the corner of the screen for a bit. Doing something similar with the clipboard might not be the worst idea — after cut/copy, a thumbnail hovers in the corner until you paste, or until 15s have passed.

The fact that "copy" results in zero visual confirmation whatsoever does seem to be a bit of a violation of standard UX guidelines. Heck, even a visual effect like a flash and quick zoom-fade-out of the copied content feels like it would be helpful.

Realistically despite decades of doing this, I'd get over it pretty quickly. I think I just like to see that I pressed the correct keys.

I do think in the early days (for me, this is the 90s) I had failures that weren't fat-fingering, the keypress just not registering. Maybe the wrong window has had focus once or twice too in some weird scenarios.

> What's to verify?

That your keypress registered. You held down the modifier and you think you hit "C", but did you actually? For unfathomable reasons, when you copy text, there's no visual or other confirmation that anything has happened.

If it takes you a long time to navigate to where you want to paste (scroll a lot in an editor, juggle windows, etc.), it's a bummer to get there and learn that your clipboard doesn't have the text on. You have to make another round trip.

I’ve had copy fail for whatever reason (maybe a bug, maybe I didn’t press C all the way) and then pasted into a terminal window. Nothing bad has happened, but it certainly could have.

While I don’t paste in place of my copy, I do use Cmd+Ctrl+V to paste in Terminal (which escapes all “special” characters with a backslash) to avoid trouble.

Many editors these days support granular versioning. Isn’t it pretty annoying to have lots of remove/add back steps in that version history?

It seems like it'd be saner to have Copy, and Copy and Preserve Formatting. But I guess the Copy, Alt-Tab, Paste, ah what the fuck!, Undo, Paste without Formatting spares a few steps.

To counter your first use case, if I'm copy-pasting the second word (say it's a complicated name) of a heading to reuse in a paragraph, I don't want that paragraph to be another heading. In another universe, the geniuses who coded the editor realized that "no one will ever want a word in the middle of the paragraph to be in a different font, in a different color and with a different background color because they copied it like that from a website with that formatting".

That and "drag selected text to random location". Who selects and drags blocks of code?

I do.

Are you talking about how code pasted in is never indented the way it originally was? It somehow adopts the indentation of the above line? I despise that.

I don’t think they were talking about that. But since you mentioned it, if you (or anyone else bothered by this) use VSCode, you can often just undo (first time undoes auto-indent if it was performed, second undoes paste). Sure it’s annoying, but at least for me it’s become so automatic I hardly notice it anymore.

I just learned this was possible the other day and I've been using it all the time since

Seriously, when that rolled out decades ago it was one of the dumbest things and still gets me. I always want to start a selection on the text. Dragging the text somewhere else never does what I want it to and I end up having to copy/paste anyway

And yet lists of things often allow dragging of individual items to rearrange them. I wonder if thinking of paragraphs of text, and perhaps even sentences, in a similar way might make the dragging of text feature more appealing (I also dislike it).

Yeah, if it was code blocks, I still wouldn’t use it but it wouldn’t seem ludicrous.

Many computer users have a hard time with invisible concepts. Copy and Cur put text away in some invisible buffer that some people don’t get, so dragging text works better for them.

I would love a way to disable drag and drop behavior globally. I absolutely never want to use it, but it's easy to accidentally trigger it.

I do this in nvim. After making a visual selection I hold alt/option/meta and use j+k to move it up and down as a block. It's been helpful a few times when reorganizing things as I write them.

I do use it occasionally but quite often if I’ve put text into the wrong field of a form. On Mac I quite often make text clippings by dragging text to the desktop

When I'm using my browser, I select and drag text from the page to the tabs section of the browser window to open a new tab which queries my search engine using the text (unless the text was a URL, in which case the new tab goes to the URL). I could copy, open a new tab, paste, and press enter in some cases, but that opens a tab to the right of all other tabs, when sometimes I want my new search tab to be in a different position.

However, I would appreciate a setting that would let me arbitrarily switch between dragging vs reselecting already selected text.

Me, all the time, but mostly across applications and not within single documents.

Sometimes because I want to keep what’s in my clipboard already; other times because it’s sensitive enough data that I don’t necessarily trust all running applications with (the threat primarily being an application incidentally logging/persisting it as part of some “helpful” feature, not outright malware).

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