Perfect! Or is it? FINE-TUNING YOUR PASTE KEYBOARD SHORTCUT REMAPPING Now let’s try it out by going back into that Gmail composition window and try the two keystroke sequences again: Woot! No reboot, no logging out, and logging in again needed. For completion sake, let’ make Command-Shift-Option-V the default “Paste” command too:Īnother click on “Add” and it’s done.

Pay attention to capitalization too, and enter that as the “Menu Title”, then simply press the key sequence you want as the new shortcut (e.g., Command-V):Ī click on “Add” and you’re done. Since the Keyboard Shortcuts is very focused in scope, you need to exactly match the wording of the command you want to tap. Super helpful, as you’ll see in a bit…įor now, you need to get the command name from the Edit menu exactly correct so let’s have a peek at the Edit menu itself: Notice that by default, the shortcut will apply to All Applications but that you can actually specify keyboard shortcuts for a specific application or program on your Mac so it doesn’t change any other program.

To do that, click on the “+” along the bottom, as highlighted above.Ī tiny window will pop open and it’s here that you enter the data needed for your new shortcut: We’re going to switch the behavior of the keyboard shortcuts so that Command-V is “Paste and Match Style”, while Command-Shift-Option-V will be the more simple “Paste” (which, recall, is really paste and include styles). This is where you’ll be adding the new shortcuts.

You’ll see something very similar to this:Īs highlighted, click on “ App Shortcuts” on the left side and the window looks quite a bit calmer and less overwhelming: Turns out that there are a lot of Keyboard settings! Start by choosing “ Shortcuts” along the very top tab bar in the window. Open up System Preferences and look for Keyboard: Use the far less intuitive Command-Option-Shift-V (honestly, Edit > Paste and Match Style is easier to remember if a bit slower) and it pastes the raw text without any formatting at all. You can see that the default Command-V pastes and includes all the styles and font changes specified in the original text, as expected. In the text input area I’ve created a rich paragraph, then using both the Command-V and Command-Option-Shift-V keyboard shortcuts, pasted that back into the message draft itself:

Just so we start with a benchmark that demonstrates the situation, here I am in Google Chrome composing an email message. Let’s have a look, shall we? MAP COMMAND-V KEYBOARD SHORTCUT TO “PASTE AND MATCH STYLE” While there’s no default solution or setting that will let you switch the logic of the shortcut Command-V paste to be Paste and Match Style, there is a pretty sneaky way to remap the keyboard shortcuts nonetheless with just a bit of work. That’s why MacOS has two versions of paste: Paste (with all formatting that logically copies across) and Paste and Match Style (which is really “paste just the plain text and ignore all styles”, but that’s another story). The problem is that sometimes you do want to have the rich formatting of text copy across properly, including bold, italics, Web links, even colors, but other times you don’t. All these decades later (that intro was way back in 1988!) people are still finding that copy and paste don’t quite work as they want. The woman sitting next to me just said “ooohhhh” and was entranced by the demo. I remember being at the introduction of the first NeXT Computer in San Francisco and Steve Jobs demonstrating how copy and paste on NeXTOS could retain formatting.

Remap keyboard on mac to match pc