Copy as Rich Text is set as default on Mac

Beta Panda Bug Reports
1

Small bug or feature?

Testing version: 2.0 (10688) on Mac (works as expected on iPad)

What were you doing:
Copying regular body text snippets (without MD formatting) from Bear, pasting into Excel table cells.

What feature did you use: ⌘C

What happened:
When pasting, the text is formatted as Helvetica 14pt,
even though the Excel sheet has Calibri (Body) 12

What did you expect to happen:
Expected it to be pasted as plain text (no formatting),
and this is how it works on iPad/iOS

This may not be considered a bug, but be desirable, for some users.
So, I suggest an option in settings to choose default copy and default paste methods.

PS. Copy as Rich Text (when chosen) and pasting into Word works very well btw.
Except: body text seems too big:
Shows up as 14 pt in Excel and Word,
maybe 12pt would be a more normal size?

Other reflections/questions

  1. Would it be possible to Copy as Rich Text, but without specifying font-family, only formatting BI, H1-H6 sizes, and all other MD format elements, but that body text was left as plain text?

  2. Or make Copy automatic by default?:

    1. If selection includes markdown formatting:
      Copies as Rich Text and Markdown (assuming clipboard supports this),
      1. so pasting into plain text fields or editors will paste as markdown,
      2. but pasting in Word, Outlook, Pages, etc, will paste as Rich Text.
    2. If selection does not include any markdown formatting:
      Copies as plain text only!
      1. so pasting it to any editors or (table cells) will be plain text only.
    3. Then of course, this could be overridden by choosing either Copy… As Rich Text, Markdown, HTML, Plaintext, (instead of default automatic behavior as outlined above j

@trix180 What do you think?

1 Like
2

I’d like to avoid this preference as much as possible but eventually a preference is something we can consider. I think pasteboards can be better on both iOS and macOS (and maybe for all the OSs). Sometimes the receiving app can do a better job if it has some clues about where the pasteboard items come from. In your case, if Excel knows the item is coming from a markdown app can choose the simple text representation instead rich text. In Bear we use some criteria to know the clipboard is coming from Chrome because the HTML representation is more useful then the simple text, but a reliable API will be definitely better.

Last time I checked the default size was 14pt but I’ll double check.

No, it’s not possible.

I think this might be too complex to understand for users because it’s too different from what other apps do.