Pure Paste 4+

Paste as plain text by default

Sindre Sorhus

    • 4.9 • 425 Ratings
    • Free

Screenshots

Description

How many times have you pasted some text into an email and ended up with a mess of different font sizes?

Pure Paste lets you paste as plain text by default. It sits in the menu bar and clears formatting (fonts, colors, bold, links, tables, etc.) from the text you copy. However, it does not touch unrelated content like files, images, etc. It also ignores content copied from password managers.

You can also choose to manually clear formatting whenever needed instead of automatically.

The app is free without ads because I love making apps. Consider leaving a nice review.


■ Features

- Automatically clears formatting
- Hide menu bar icon
- Exclude certain apps
- Optionally preserve links
- Remove tracking parameters from URLs
- Normalize newlines and lists
- Launch at login
- Shortcuts support


■ Remove tracking parameters

Pure Paste supports 200+ common tracking parameters (e.g. Google UTM) and it has special support for removing tracking from links to Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok.


■ Bonus

If you have enabled the setting to remove tracking parameters from URLs when copying, the app also resolves some URLs to popular services offline whenever possible to improve the speed of opening links later on. These websites often add useless redirects when you copy links. For example, it can rewrite URLs like youtube.be, l.facebook.com, safelinks.protection.outlook.com, google.com/url?=…, etc, to its final destination.


■ FAQ

‣ Why not just use the “Paste and Match Style” menu item or “⌥⇧⌘V”?

- That menu item is not available in all apps.
- The keyboard shortcut is hard to remember and type.
- This app can exclude certain apps, preserve links, and also remove tracking parameters from URLs.


■ Privacy

The app accesses your clipboard but does not store or send it anywhere. It is not even able to connect to the internet due to self-imposed restrictions that are enforced by macOS (no network entitlement).


■ Support

You can contact me through the feedback button in the app.

What’s New

Version 1.11.3

- Bug fixes.

Ratings and Reviews

4.9 out of 5
425 Ratings

425 Ratings

smart burro ,

Finally someone made this: Thank you Sindre!

Yeah in Word I could click the Paste drop down in the ribbon and select Keep Text Only, but that would require me to take my hands off the keyboard and use my mouse which when I am working on a Word document I try to do as little as possible. There is a shortcut for Paste Special (Cmd Ctrl V) in Word but that brings up the Paste Special menu that then requires selecting Unformatted Text. I also like that it removes annoying tracking parameters from URLs and gets rid of leading and trailing whitespace. It's a fairly simple app, but a lot of the most useful apps are. On top of that it's free (though I personally thing the developer should at least charge $0.99 or add a way for users to "tip" him if they want) which is especially nice since it seems like every app wants you to pay for a subscription these days.

Federico Mo ,

Only one little step from being perfect

Thank you for this app. I have been using another app for years to clear formating when pasting texts between apps but that app hasn't been updated for many, many years and I don't think it supports the Apple silicon architecture. So it was a relief when I found this app.
But there is one simple thing where this app could be improved on. That is to have a status indicator of whether the automatic formating clear is on or off, so that you don't need to click the app icon to see if you it's on.
The old app I used achieved this by the mebubar icon switching between two different grey scale, so when the formating clear is on, the icon is white, and when it's off, the icon is greyed out. I wish the author would adopt this idea. Thank you.

TallonRain ,

One of my most essential everyday tools

This is one of my favorite tools for my everyday workflows. I work in a lot of applications and custom environments and I very frequently need to copy/paste text from all over the place, which is often inconveniently formatted. In nearly every case I just need plaintext and Pure Paste fixes everything for me, so I no longer need to paste into a paintext file and copy again before sending the text to its destination. Unobtrusive, does exactly what it says, and provides some useful customization options to tune it to your needs. Pure Paste is absolutely excellent.

App Privacy

The developer, Sindre Sorhus, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy.

Data Not Collected

The developer does not collect any data from this app.

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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