Pasting plain text in Windows isn’t as easy as in browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Hitting Ctrl + Shift + V to dump out a clean copy of your clipboard isn’t universally supported, so you’ll often wind up with HTML links and formatting gunking up your pasted text, which you need to manually remove. But that’ll eventually change if you’ve got Microsoft’s awesome PowerToys tool installed: As reported by Neowin last week, a new feature called “PastePlain” has shown up on Github as part of the project.
Based on PowerToy’s existing Text Extractor utility, it should work just as described. Any formatting—bold, font size, highlights, etc.—will get stripped when you paste text using a keyboard shortcut. The default will be Ctrl + Win + V, but you’ll be able to customize the shortcut, too. A specific release date hasn’t yet been specified yet.
As we all wait, you can play with other PowerToys if you aren’t already familiar with the tool. The open-source project allows you to supercharge your Windows experience with additional features and customizations. Our personal favorites include more options for snapped windows, quick batch renaming of files,and quick batch resizing of images, but you should check out all the highlights.
No lie, though—once PastePlain releases, that one’s going straight to the top of the list. The routine of “copy, paste into Notepad, copy again, paste into the actual program we’re using” is very past its retirement date.
Author: Alaina Yee, Senior Editor
Alaina Yee is PCWorld's resident bargain hunter—when she's not covering software, PC building, and more, she's scouring for the best tech deals. Previously her work has appeared in PC Gamer, IGN, Maximum PC, and Official Xbox Magazine. You can find her on Twitter at @morphingball.