Paste without formatting on Mac: two different approaches

For the current copy: match the destination style

Place the insertion point in your document and press ⌥⇧⌘V, or find Paste and Match Style in the Edit menu. Where available, it applies the surrounding content’s style. Check your destination app’s menu: available commands and shortcuts can differ.

You do not need clipboard history to change how the current copy is pasted. Start here if the problem is simply how a paragraph you just copied looks in another document.

For an earlier copy: recover plain text

Open Dashi with ⇧⌘V and find the item. Right-click its row and choose Copy without formatting. The action is also available on a selected or hovered row. Return to your document and press ⌘V.

For this action, Dashi writes only the text representation to the clipboard. The saved history entry is not rewritten; choosing it normally still restores its retained formats. This action is not available for images.

Example: a website brief in a client email

You copied two lines from the Atlas brief and then several invoice references. To include those lines in an email to Emma Laurent, search Dashi for a word from the brief, copy the result without formatting and paste it into the reply.

You avoid carrying over the source website’s typography. Still check the result: bullets may become ordinary characters, tables can lose structure and a rich link might leave only its label. This fictional example does not imply that Dashi verifies or rewrites the meaning of the text.

Plain text is not the same as matching style

Plain text lacks rich-format presentation attributes. Matching style is an operation performed by the receiving application. A short paragraph may look similar either way, while a table, list or link can behave differently. Test the result in the destination that matters to you.

Neither approach removes the actual words, numbers or sensitive information. Removing formatting does not anonymize a document or make a command safe to execute in Terminal.

If the result is not what you expected

• Make sure you chose the correct history entry.
• Try the Edit menu command instead of assuming one shortcut works everywhere.
• Check line breaks, URLs and amounts after pasting.
• To preserve a table, use the normal format or the destination app’s import tools.

The current Dashi version does not perform optical character recognition on images. A screenshot containing text is not a text history entry.