Paste and Match Style

Beta Panda Feedback
1

In Bear 1.0, Edit>Paste From>Rich Text actually implemented the more common Paste and Match Style. Here are the results of pasting two different things–some formatted text from TextEdit and a URL–using both Paste and Paste From Rich Text:

Paste: plain and **bold** and *italics*
PFRT: plain and bold and italics

Paste: [Google](https://www.google.com/)
PFRT: https://www.google.com/

In Bear 2.0, this changed. And I think it changed for the worse:

Paste: plain and bold and italics
PFRT: plain and **bold** and *italics*

Paste: [Google](https://www.google.com/)
PFRT: ``

There are three problems here:

  1. I don’t think it is desirable to have the default operation (Command-V) strip formatting! Everyone’s fingers are trained to expect the opposite, because that is what every other app does, including Bear 1.

  2. I relied heavily on the old behavior to insert raw URLs. As you can see from the example above, Paste From Rich Text is now a no-op when the clipboard contains a URL. As far as I can tell, there now no way to paste a raw URL. Yes, I know that I can turn off “Auto fill title…” in Preferences. But most of the time, I want the title. It’s just a few websites and use-cases where this is the wrong thing.

  3. The keybinding for PFRT is Opt-Shift-Cmd-V. In most other apps–Outlook, Safari, TextEdit–this is Paste and Match Style. In Bear 1, that was fine, because that was essentially what it did even though it was misnamed, so my fingers where happy. In Bear 2, Opt-Shift-Cmd-V does the opposite of what my fingers expect.

Recommendations:

  1. Get rid of Edit>Paste From>Rich Text. Move that functionality to Edit>Paste. That way, Bear 2 will behave like Bear 1 (as well as just about every other app).

  2. Implement Edit>Paste and Match Style, and bind it to Opt-Shift-Cmd-V. That will make Bear 2 behave like most other apps, and will also preserve the behavior of keybindings from Bear 1.

1 Like
2

Hello,

The URL empty paste result is a bug and will be fixed with the next update, thanks for reporting this.

Yes, the normal paste behaves differently in B2 beta but we are not sure about keeping this in the final release. We introduced the current behavior with Panda and seems appreciated but we want to hear from Bear users before taking a decision.

I think both versions have their pro and cons but I might prefer the version you suggest. However, this is not the case for iOS where the RTF pasteboard is not used by the vast majority of the apps.

3

It makes sense to paste the formatting by default. Personally, I write notes in Bear with Markdown in mind, so I would expect copying and pasting to work in a Markdown-first approach.

2 Likes
4

Hello! I’m making a request to change the “Paste From > Plain Text” menu item to the more common “Paste and Match Style” used widely throughout macOS. This is so that I can override the keybinding for “Paste and Match Style” system-wide in the Settings app. I did so, as I believe many other Mac users do, purely due to how unwieldy the Opt+Cmd+Shift+V shortcut is. I was pretty surprised that this setting did not work in Bear, so I had to investigate.

This is a side effect of the menu items being named this way at present:

  • Both “Edit > Copy As > Plain Text” and “Edit > Paste From > Plain Text” exist in Bear.
  • To change the keyboard shortcut for a menu item, you need to input the exact name of the menu item in Settings (an approach is shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6BL2pWYNfA).
  • However, the menu item name of both these items is “Plain Text”. This means that when I change it in Settings, it only affects the “Copy As > Plain Text” menu item and not “Paste From > Plain Text”, because the former comes first. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to change this behaviour, and no way to target the “Paste From > Plain Text” menu item in the keyboard shortcut settings.
  • Changing the menu item to “Paste and Match Style” would be more familiar for Mac users coming from other apps, and allow any system-wide keyboard shortcut changes to work.

I’m not as familiar with the behaviour of the different paste options as OP, so I don’t know if the behaviour of “Paste and Match Style” and “Paste From > Plain Text” should be the same. But I do use “Paste From > Plain Text” pretty often, which behaves as I expect, and the keyboard shortcut (Opt+Cmd+V), while short, doesn’t match what I use in other apps. If the “Paste and Match Style” name doesn’t make sense, I’d still suggest giving “Paste From > Plain Text” a unique name so it can be distinguished from “Copy As > Plain Text” and its keyboard shortcut changed.

Thanks for considering my suggestion! :slight_smile:

5

You can edit the keyboard shortcut of ‘Paste From → Plain Text’ specifically by using this format in keyboard shortcut section in System Settings:

Edit->Paste From->Plain Text

Make sure that all of the menu item names are typed perfectly and that there’s no spaces around the ->. That’s a hyphen/minus and greater-than sign.

1 Like
6

I’m of two minds about the Copy/Paste functionality in Bear 2.0. I’m still caught off guard about how it’s different from every other macOS app. Generally the Bear UX is DWIM magic, so it’s a bit jarring for the Copy/Paste UI to just dump all the options in the user’s lap and say “you figure it out”.

On the other hand, clipboard management in macOS is such a mess, that magic may just not be possible here. Having all the options means that I really can always copy text in and out of Bear with exactly the formatting that I want…even if it takes a couple of tries with [Cmd-Z] in between. So I guess on the whole I’m a fan of the current implementation.