Paste as plain text on Mac (no formatting carried over)

You copy a sentence from a web page or Notion and paste it into your email or doc — and suddenly the font is wrong, the link is purple, and the line spacing is broken. The clipboard carried the rich-text formatting along with the words.

Two paths

Native macOS. Most Apple apps (Mail, TextEdit, Notes, Pages) support ⌥⇧⌘V for “Paste and Match Style” — but it’s not universal. Slack, Notion, many web apps, and a lot of third-party tools either ignore it or use a different combo. Some apps don’t expose a plain-text paste at all, so you end up pasting into TextEdit first, copying the result, and pasting again. Tedious.

Perch. A clipboard manager that strips formatting on the way out, the same way in every app. You can paste a single item as plain text, or flip a switch so every paste is plain text by default.

Paste one item as plain text

1. Open Perch with ⌘⇧V.
2. Select the item you want to paste.
3. Press ⌘K to open the Command Bar.
4. Choose Copy as Plain Text, then paste with ⌘V as normal.

The Command Bar also has UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, and (for code-like snippets) “Strip Indentation” — handy when you’ve copied something out of a screenshot OCR or a chat thread.

Make every paste plain text

If you almost never want formatting:

1. Open Perch's Settings.
2. Go to General.
3. Turn on Always paste as plain text.

Every paste from Perch will drop the styling. You can still copy rich text normally with ⌘C — this setting only affects what Perch pastes back.

One caveat

“Always paste as plain text” only applies to pastes from Perch’s history. A direct ⌘V after a fresh ⌘C still uses whatever the source app put on the clipboard. The cleanest workflow is to always paste via ⌘⇧V → ↩ — you get consistent results everywhere.