Make 'paste and match style' the default behavior

Jul 08, '09 07:30:02AM

Contributed by: robg

If you copy information from styled pages -- web sites, documents, etc. -- you're aware that if you then paste that information (Command-V) in a style-aware application, the style gets pasted, too. Most of the time this is just annoying. The workaround is to use Paste and Match Style (Shift-Command-Option-V) instead. However, it's a pain to do this every time.

Yesterday on Twitter, a solution made the rounds: just use the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the System Preferences panel to set Paste and Match Style to Command-V. Open that panel, click the plus sign, leave the first pop-up set to All Applications, enter Paste and Match Style in the Menu Title box, type Command-V in the Keyboard Shortcut box, then click Add.

An anonymous tipster submitted a command-line version of this modification, in case you want/need to run it remotely or push it out via Apple Remote Desktop:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences -dict-add NSUserKeyEquivalents "Paste and Match Style" -string "@v"
After changing the shortcut via either method, Command-V will do a Paste and Match Style in any application where it's possible; in others (such as Excel), Command-V will still paste as usual. There is, however, a downside.

If you're trying to paste copied images (such as into iChat), Command-V won't work at all. So as cool as this solution is, I don't use it myself, as I do this quite a bit. Instead, I simplified the Paste and Match Style shortcut (in 10.5) to Command-Option-V. This requires much less in the way of finger gymnastics, making it nearly as easy to use as Command-V. As an alternative, you could add a second shortcut for Paste as Command-Option-V (or whatever you like). Then, when you need to paste an image somewhere, use Command-Option-V instead of Command-V.

Comments (21)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090707150238778