You copy a paragraph from a website and paste it into a document. Instead of matching your document’s font, it arrives in 18px blue Helvetica with a background color. Now you’re manually reformatting text instead of writing.
This is one of the most common complaints about copy and paste on Mac. The good news: there’s a shortcut for it, and a few tricks that make it even better.
The paste-without-formatting shortcut
macOS has a built-in shortcut for pasting plain text that matches the destination’s formatting:
Paste and Match Style
- Copy text normally with ⌘C
- Instead of ⌘V, press ⌘⇧⌥V (Command + Shift + Option + V)
- The text is pasted using the font, size, and style of the destination document
This is technically called “Paste and Match Style” rather than “paste as plain text.” The difference matters: it doesn’t strip all formatting — it adapts the pasted text to look like the surrounding content. In most cases, this is exactly what you want.
The four-key shortcut ⌘⇧⌥V is one of the most useful keyboard shortcuts on Mac — and one of the least known. It should probably be the default.
App-by-app support
Not every app uses the same shortcut. Here’s how paste-without-formatting works across popular Mac apps:
The inconsistency across apps is part of what makes this frustrating. There’s no single shortcut that works everywhere.
Make plain paste the default
If you almost always want to paste without formatting, you can remap the shortcut so that ⌘V itself does a plain paste:
Remap ⌘V to Paste and Match Style
- Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts
- Select App Shortcuts in the sidebar
- Click the + button
- Set Application to All Applications
- Set Menu Title to exactly: Paste and Match Style
- Set shortcut to ⌘V
- Click Add
After this, pressing ⌘V in any app with a “Paste and Match Style” menu item will paste without formatting. The original rich paste is still available through the Edit menu.
Note: this only works in apps that have a menu item called exactly “Paste and Match Style.” Some apps use different names like “Paste as Plain Text” or “Paste Without Formatting,” and you’d need separate entries for those.
More paste tricks
Beyond plain text pasting, here are a few more clipboard tricks that Mac users often miss:
Kill and yank (Terminal). In Terminal, Ctrl+K cuts text from the cursor to the end of the line (“kill”), and Ctrl+Y pastes it back (“yank”). This uses a separate buffer from the system clipboard, so it won’t overwrite your ⌘C contents.
Paste clipboard in Terminal. You can also use pbpaste in Terminal to output clipboard contents, and pbcopy to copy Terminal output to the clipboard. For example: ls | pbcopy copies a file listing to your clipboard.
Screenshots to clipboard. Press ⌘⇧Ctrl+4 to take a screenshot directly to the clipboard instead of saving a file. Then paste it anywhere with ⌘V.
QuietClip complements these tricks by keeping a history of everything you copy — formatted text, plain text, images, and files. Press ⌘⇧V to access your history. Built for macOS 14+, under 5 MB, entirely local. Free to start, $8.99 once for Pro.
Master your Mac clipboard.
QuietClip adds searchable clipboard history to macOS. Combined with paste tricks like ⌘⇧⌥V, you’ll never fight with formatting again. Free to start, $8.99 once for Pro.