A Cool Tip for Writers Using a Mac
…Namely those who find themselves ‘pasting’ a lot.
I’ve meant to let people know about this little trick for a while now. It’s nothing revolutionary or special; it just helps quite a bit with workflow when you have to copy and paste from different sources, and have source formatting slap you in the face.
The Problem
You copy some text from any digital source, and unless where you’re pasting it is a plaintext editor (hoorah for iA Writer), you often get all sorts of formatting issues.
As an example, I wanted to paste a special character from a Google search result into a Google doc I’ve been working on, and not only did it not format correctly in my document, it also messed up my entire paragraph.
The Solution
The solution to quickly strip any copied text of its formatting is only ever a simple key-combination away, if you’re on a Mac. Spotlight, perhaps the best-ever-finding-tool created, has a format-free search bar that you can use as an intermediary to de-format text you’d like to paste elsewhere.
Spotlight can be accessed very easily, by typing the key-combination cmd+SPACE (command key (⌘) plus the space-bar), and will subsequently take a cmd+V paste command. After you’ve placed your text in the search field, simply press cmd+A to select all of the text again, and then finally cmd+C to copy it back into your clipboard. After a few tries, this sequence becomes pretty easy to repeat quickly!
So there you have it, not the most impactful workflow tool, but elegant and useful all the same, especially if you draw from (formatted) sources a lot.
A Sidenote
I’m not sure what the exact character limit of Spotlight’s search field is, but there is one, and you can’t paste reams of text in there. This is meant as a solution for small snippets that are otherwise a pain to reformat manually.
