1-up: The case for a smarter paste

You know how when you copy something, from a website maybe, and then paste it into a document (or sheet in our case) – how the result is most certainly never what you expected? Like when you paste a link, and in RTF it’s always blue or in the original font size, and then you struggle to remember that CMD-ALT-SHIFT-CTRL-V-or-so shortcut, so you can “paste and match style”, for whatever that means?

And how in Ulysses, you may want to paste multiple paragraphs as code block, or into a code block, or some JavaScript as Raw Source and *not* as code? Or some Markdown link as plain text, instead of Ulysses doing its conversion magic and giving you a link bubble? Or how you have an RTF paragraph with some bold and whatnot, and how you maybe want to paste that semantically intact or the exact opposite: disregard any formatting altogether?

Well, we have been flooded with support emails asking for one way or another, and each plea for one default or logic had its merit. But in the end, it all comes down to on-the-fly, user-selectable, always-depends-on-context behaviour.

And so we changed the way pasting works for 1.1, and not just in small ways, but on a fundamental level. For starters, a simple, standard CMD-V now always assumes you’re pasting into the current semantics *as* the current semantics, and just as if you had manually entered character for character. So if you’re pasting a bunch of paragraphs into a code block – it’s code. If you’re pasting into a standard paragraph, it’s plain text (and whatever markup you’re using).

Hold CMD-V a bit longer, though, and you’ll get to choose between all possible paste conversions. Live. Instantaneous. Via a nifty little popup and some number keys.

It’s… really cool. You’ll see.