Why the native shortcut is not really plain text
Paste and Match Style matches the formatting at the insertion point. Text arrives styled like its new neighbours, which is usually what you want and occasionally not. Plain text carries no styling at all, so nothing can be inherited.
Word ignores it. Plain paste on Mac Word lives behind ⌃⌘V, which opens Paste Special. Pick Unformatted Text from the list. Word will not remember your choice, so it is two steps every time.
Google Docs and Notion use ⇧⌘V. Both run in the browser and both define their own plain-paste command on that combination. Muscle memory built on the native three-modifier version does nothing here.
Apple Notes and Mail obey, then surprise you. ⇧⌥⌘V works in both, and "match style" is literal. Paste into a note where the cursor sits in a heading and your clean text becomes a heading. Same in a reply where the quoted block sets the style.
Plain Text is the first cleaner in Klipto's preview, and tapping it also flips the preview to a plain render. That matters more than it sounds: you see the characters the target app will receive, before you commit, rather than finding out after the paste lands in a shared doc.
The cleaners compose on one clip. A paragraph copied from a PDF can be joined into running text, have its double spaces collapsed and its formatting dropped, in three taps, then pasted with ordinary ⌘V.
The remap that looks clever and is not
You can bind ⌘V to Paste and Match Style per app in System Settings, under Keyboard, then App Shortcuts. It works. It also shadows real paste in every app where you sometimes need the rich version, and you have to add an entry for each app by name. I would rather have two shortcuts than one that lies to me.
The other trap is thinking plain text solves everything. Formatting and characters are separate problems. Text out of ChatGPT pastes with em dashes, curly quotes and zero-width characters intact, and stripping the styling leaves every one of them in place. That cleanup is a different pass, and you can try it free in your browser.
What I use, honestly
⇧⌘V for anything going into Slack, a doc or a form. Plain Text in the preview when I want to look at the result first, or when I am stacking it with other cleanups.
There is no always-on toggle that strips formatting from every paste in Klipto, and I am not going to imply there is. Anti-LLM is the only cleanup that runs automatically on every ⌘V. Formatting removal stays manual, one keypress or one tap, because plain text is wrong often enough that a silent global switch would cost me more than it saves.
If stripping formatting is the entire problem you have, install Pure Paste from Sindre Sorhus, or Plain Paste. They strip by default, they do it well, and they cost nothing or nearly nothing. The trade is that they do only that. Klipto is worth the $19.99 when you also want history, snippets and the other twenty transforms on the same clip.