Categories
Apple atrocities

Paste Without Formatting

Please pardon the uncharacteristically calm, respectful and positive tone of this post. The text below is a feature request I left on the Apple forum. I want to persuade them, and rumor has it that you catch more flies with honey than with boiling vitriol, my normal liquid of choice.

iOS Mail badly needs a “Paste Without Formatting” feature.

Currently, Mail lacks any convenient way to get pasted text into the default format. To get it to match, a user has to drill down into the formatting features and manually set them. I don’t even know what manual settings to choose to prevent the pasted text from looking weird.

A general point: I don’t know if I’m typical, but 99% of the time I wanted pasted text to match the formatting of any text I’m editing, whether email, word processing document, blog, or social media post. But with very few exceptions, I have to work against the UI to get this to happen. For whatever reason, the product management world seems to believe users want to paste with formatting most of the time. It seems to me that in most cases in most apps “Paste Without Formatting” would be the better default, and that “Paste With Formatting” should be the manually chosen option. Am I wrong?

I had all kinds of headaches when I accidentally pasted the text above with formatting, requiring me to undo the action on this massive iPad. And, of course, that means grasping the device with both hands and heaving it back and forth using the strength of my entire upper body, because the dipshits over at WordPress only provide “Shake to Undo” on their incredibly shitty and rapidly deteriorating iOS app.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *