Remove Text Formatting With Plain Clip

I believe most of us have the same gripe about copying text and pasting it onto another application but not wanting the formatting to be pasted as well.

There are many ways to strip text of it’s formatting, eg. pasting text into Text Edit, selecting “Make Plain Text” from the top menu, copy the text and pasting it into your desired application. Or pasting the formatted text into your browser’s address bar, select all and copy the text again before pasting the text into your desired application.

All these takes a number of steps and all these time adds up to cause annoyance, here’s an easier way to strip text formatting, meet Plain Clip (Free).

Faceless Application

Plain Clip is a faceless application, meaning there is no user interface, you install it on your Mac, the next time you copy a formatted text, you only need to launch this program to remove it’s formatting. What happens behind the background is that when Plain Clip launches, it strips the currently copied text on the clipboard of it’s formatting and closes itself. So that you can paste the currently copied text in it’s unformatted glory.

If you’re using an application launcher program like QuickSilver or LaunchBar, the process of stripping formatted text is even faster.

Using TextExpander with Plain Clip

But here’s the quickest way. This will require to be a proud owner of TextExpander ($29.95). For those of you who have no idea what TextExpander is, it’s a Mac app that expands your pre-defined text snippets, images or both by typing an abbreviation. More info about TextExpander in this post.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new snippet
2. Paste this into the snippet field: do shell script “‘/Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc’ -v”
3. Select “Applescript” as the content:
4. Assign an abbreviation to your snippet, eg. ;pc (pc is for Plain Clip, so it’s easy to remember, you can use your own abbreviation of course)

The next time you need to copy a chunk of formatted text, type “;pc” and voila! You pasted text will be unformatted. The fastest way to un-format and paste text at the same time.

Have fun!