PlainPaste is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices to copy, paste or cut plainly on demand independently of programs you are using.
If you copy or paste text on a Windows machine, the formatting of the text is copied along with it to the Windows Clipboard.
While that may be desired at times, it can be problematic if you need to paste the textual contents to an editor that supports the formatting, but want to paste it without it.
Some programs allow you to do that natively. Firefox and Thunderbird support the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-V for instance which always pastes text as plain text without formatting.
If the programs you use don’t support this functionality however, you will have to find another way. Some users may paste the text to a plain text editor before they copy and paste it again to the program they want to paste it to without formatting. Works, but takes more time than it should.
PlainPaste
PlainPaste is a portable program for Windows that introduces the plain copying, pasting and cutting functionality globally.
Here is how it works. Instead of using the keyboard shortcut once to paste text, you use it twice to do a plain paste. The program delays the double-key presses a bit for that to give you enough time to press the shortcut a second time before the content is pasted.
This works really well, but has the disadvantage that you will notice a delay during regular pasting operations.
PlainPaste enables the option for pasting only by default. You need to open the preferences of the application to enable it for copying or cutting as well.
There you may also change the shortcut delay. You may need to experiment with the delay to find the right balance between firing the event off to plain paste, copy or cut, and the delay you are experiencing when using the normal copy, paste functionality.
So, if you need to use plain Clipboard operations at times, you may find the program useful for that as it retains the old functionality, but adds the plain options to it.
Closing Words
PlainPaste is a portable program for Windows designed to provide you with options to cut, paste or copy data without formatting to and from the clipboard.
It depends largely on how you work on Windows machines if you find the program useful or superfluous.
Now You: How do you handle plain pasting on Windows?