[red_admiral]

Once upon a time, you could strip formatting from the clipboard in notepad with ^V ^A ^C, for example if you were trying to paste from edge into word. There's still a market for a non-rich text editor, without autosave, cloud, account login or AI.

[hurfdurf]

Apparently pasting unformatted text in browsers can be done with Ctrl+Shift+V. Pasting it in Office is Ctrl+Alt+V. Always the odd one out. Taken from here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220906-00/?p=10...

[kiwijamo]

It doesn't work everywhere though as there are still apps that don't offer a plain text paste, and as you have noted the shortcut can be different in different applications.

[tfvlrue]

I've been using this AutoHotKey script long enough that Ctrl+Shift+V has become a muscle memory for "paste without formatting". In case it's useful to anyone else, put this in a file (clipboard.ahk) and run it at startup:

  ^+v::
  Clipboard:=Clipboard
  Send ^v

That way, it works globally, it's not dependent on any particular application implementing it.

[gmueckl]

Unless it changed recently, the faster way is to just press ctrl+shift+V for "paste special" in Word, which should open up the paste dialog with "Unformated Text" preselected (IIRC), so immediately pressing Enter should close the dialog and paste the stripped text.

[leni536]

Careful when doing it in Teams. ctrl+shift+V is "paste without formatting", ctrl+shift+C is "call everyone".

[hbn]

If you don't care about losing line breaks, I've used my browser's URL bar for this for years.

Cmd-L Cmd-V Cmd-A Cmd-C

(swap for Cmd for Ctrl on non-Mac)

[ThrowawayTestr]

Notepad in Windows 11 (while not autosave) will preserve unsaved documents.