Convert a markdown note to formatted text on Mac

You wrote a clean markdown note — headings, a bulleted list, maybe a code block — and now you need to paste it into Gmail or a Notion doc as actual formatting, not raw asterisks and hashes. macOS doesn’t do this conversion natively.

Two paths

Native macOS. There’s no built-in “paste this markdown as formatted text” option anywhere on the system. The usual workarounds: pipe it through pandoc from Terminal (pandoc input.md -o output.rtf), open the RTF in TextEdit, copy from there. Or paste into a markdown-aware web app first (like the Notion or GitHub editor) and then re-copy. Both work, but they break the flow — you’ve turned a one-key task into three apps.

Scratch. Has a dedicated “Copy as Rich Text” command that renders the markdown and puts the formatted version on the clipboard, ready to paste into any rich-text-accepting app.

Convert and paste with Scratch

1. Open the note in Scratch (or write the markdown directly there).
2. Select the portion you want to convert — or leave nothing selected to take the whole note.
3. Press ⌥⇧⌘C (Option-Shift-Command-C), or use Edit → Copy as Rich Text from the menu bar.
4. Switch to the destination app — Gmail, Mail, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Pages — and paste with ⌘V.
5. Headings, bold/italic, bulleted and numbered lists, links, and code spans land formatted. The receiving app's font and color take over, so the result looks native there.

When to use the other copy command

Scratch also has plain “Copy as Markdown” on ⇧⌘C — that one copies the raw source. Use it when you’re moving a note to another markdown-aware tool (a static site, a README, another markdown editor). Use Copy as Rich Text whenever the destination doesn’t understand markdown syntax, which is most of the apps you talk to during a normal day.