3 Simple Ways to Strip Styling & Formatting from Text in Mac OS X

Want to quickly remove text styles and font formatting from some text? Here are two three super fast ways to do just that, and they don’t require any third party downloads, both features are built right into Mac OS X. The first two methods will use an alternate copy & paste command that removes styling in the process, and the third trick will use TextEdit to strip all styling. Both solutions will work great if you want to remove or formatting when copying from the web to emails, and can save you the embarrassment of sharing hideous and unprofessional font styling with the world.

1: Strip Styling & Formatting with a Special Paste & Match Style Command

There’s a modifier command to change how paste works so that it “matches style”, which if you’re pasting into a plain text document or a new email composition, will removes all font styles and formatting in that pasting process, regardless of what is stored in the clipboard. It’s just a variation of the normal copy & paste trick:

• Copy the text as usual with Command+C
• Paste the copied text and match current style by using Command+Option+Shift+V

Notice the difference from the normal Command+V paste trick, which would include the formatting. Thanks to @hozaka and others for pointing out this modifier sequence on twitter and in the comments, and thanks to Rob for clarifying the function.

2: Remove Formatting with the Alternate Cut & Paste Commands

Alternate what now? Many don’t know this, but other than Command+C and Command+V there are an alternate set of cut and paste commands available in Mac OS X that also use an alternate clipboard, but also have the added benefit of stripping formatting from copied text.

• Highlight the text and hit Control+K to ‘cut’ without formatting (rather than command+c)
• Paste in the desired location with Control+Y (rather than command+v)

Again, these alternate cut & paste commands remove all formatting and styling, and they also use an alternative clipboard so you will not rewrite anything in the primary clipboard. Because the clipboards are different, you must be consistent with the command usage, and you can’t cross from one to the other without pasting the text elsewhere and then recopying it again. The downside is that not all apps support their usage, so you may want to use the next trick instead, which is universal since it relies on a separate application.

3: Strip Text Styling & Formatting with TextEdit

TextEdit the simple text editing app that is included in all versions of Mac OS X, and you can use it’s built-in rich text conversion abilities to strip formatting very quickly. Here’s all you need to do:

• Open a new TextEdit file and paste in the styled/formatted text
• Hit Command+Shift+T to convert the document to plain text and remove all formatting
• Select all and copy again to have the unstyled version in the clipboard

This removes all formatting but will retain line simple line breaks that are respected by plain text documents.

The end result of either approach will look like this, just simple plain text without the styling, formatting, fonts, colors, or whatever else has made it look unprofessional:

You can also just open documents in TextEdit and resave them as plain text to convert that way, or you can do batch file conversions easily with the textutil command line tool that comes in all versions of Mac OS X.

I have to do this with every email, is there a better way?

If you’re constantly stripping formatting funkiness out of emails and you use the OS X Mail app, consider toggling the preference switch to always send emails as plain text rather than rich formatted text. This will force all outbound emails to be normal looking, even if you’re responding to a comic sans disaster.