Soon there will be a PastePlain PowerToys utility to paste what you have copied as plain text without formatting

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PowerToys developers are currently working on a new utility that will make it possible to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Win + V to paste text and strip away formatting.

Users of Microsoft Word -- and, indeed, other word processors -- will be familiar with the ability to copy and paste text either with or without the original formatting being retained. But this is not something that is supported by all apps, hence the need for the PastePlain PowerToys module.

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As Taras Buria notes when sharing news of the upcoming PastePlain module for PowerToys users, web browsers have support for the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + V for pasting text and removing formatting. This is not a system-wide keyboard shortcut however, so pasted text often has to be manually unformatted.

But all this will come to an end when PastePlain sees the light of day. There is no word on just when this module will be added to PowerToys, but there is information about it available on GitHub.

A pull request about the under-development utility explains that PastePlain "introduces the 'Paste as Plain Text' module which allows the user to paste their most recent clipboard content as plain text (as opposed to formatted text)".

A further description reads:

This is heavily based on the work done for the "Text Extractor" module then ripping out anything that may be unnecessary. The same KeyboardMonitor is implemented and used. The interesting logic really falls inside the KeyboardMonitor as that is where the clipboard is opened/read/modified, then a ctrl+v input sequence is injected.

The default key binding for this will be ctrl+win+v.

More information is available here.

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