At a glance
- ⇧⌘V pastes plain text in whatever app has focus. No menu item to hunt for.
- Plain Text in the preview does the same by tap, and flips the preview itself to a plain render so you can see what the target will get.
- Copy goes out plain too. After the tap, both Copy and Paste hand over clean characters.
- Works where the Edit menu does not: Word, Notes, Mail, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, editors.
- Stackable with the rest of the cleanup: join wrapped lines, collapse spaces, drop blank and duplicate lines, sort, strip HTML, remove emoji and invisible characters.
Why the native shortcut lets you down
Paste and Match Style is not the same thing as plain text, and the name says so. It adapts what you paste to the formatting around it, which means pasted text can still inherit a font or a size you never asked for. Plain text has no formatting to inherit.
The remapping trick has a cost people find out later. You can bind ⌘V to Paste and Match Style per app in System Settings under Keyboard, then App Shortcuts. It shadows ordinary paste in tools that need the rich version, and you have to repeat it for every app.
Apple's answer is Command-Option-Shift-V, documented in Apple's copy-and-paste guide. Three modifiers plus a letter is a stretch few people keep in muscle memory. The deeper problem is that each app decides for itself. Word puts plain paste behind Control-Command-V and a Paste Special dialog, Google Docs and Notion use Command-Shift-V in the browser, and Notes and Mail sometimes match the surrounding style anyway.
So one shortcut turns into a per-app quiz. Klipto changes the clip rather than the paste command, which is why the result is identical everywhere.
What is honest about the automatic part
There is no toggle that strips formatting from every paste, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Plain Text is one tap in the preview, or ⇧⌘V when your hands are already on the keyboard. Anti-LLM is the one cleanup Klipto can run automatically on every ⌘V, and formatting removal is deliberately manual.
That is a real difference from a dedicated utility. Pure Paste and Plain Paste strip formatting by default, they do it well, and they are free. If that one behaviour is all you want, they are a fine answer. The trade is that they do only that.
Native ⌘⌥⇧V | Pure Paste and similar | Klipto | |
|---|---|---|---|
| One key press, every app | no | yes | yes |
| Automatic on every paste | no | yes | no, one tap or ⇧⌘V |
| True plain text, nothing inherited | partial | yes | yes |
| Clipboard history and the Stack | no | no | yes |
| 20+ other transforms on the same clip | no | no | yes |
The same clip, more cleaning
Plain Text is the first of the text cleanup set, and the set composes. On one clip you can join wrapped lines from a PDF, collapse runs of spaces, remove blank and duplicate lines, sort them, strip HTML tags, and clear zero-width and non-breaking spaces. Tap the chips in the order you want them applied, and undo the last one if you go too far.
Case changes sit in the same panel, one tap each. Klipto knows what you copied, so a colour, a URL or a JSON blob each show their own actions instead of the whole catalogue. For AI output, Anti-LLM handles the dashes, curly quotes and hidden characters, and you can try that one free in your browser.