Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share “Clipboard Normalization” by jefftk
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
“Clipboard Normalization” by jefftk
The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but this is often
not what I want. I want comfortable text:
italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
spacing.
Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog
post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font
size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:
If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at
all:
I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links
is a pain.
What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented
in Markdown. So I automated
this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard,
passes it through pandoc twice (HTML
to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the
clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:
You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:
$ normalize-clipboard
[...]
---
First published:
December 25th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GLBRarCLpq7XwhxFi/clipboard-normalization
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
View all episodes
By LessWrongThe world is divided into plain text and rich text, but this is often
not what I want. I want comfortable text:
italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
spacing.
Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog
post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font
size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:
If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at
all:
I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links
is a pain.
What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented
in Markdown. So I automated
this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard,
passes it through pandoc twice (HTML
to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the
clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:
You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:
$ normalize-clipboard
[...]
---
First published:
December 25th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GLBRarCLpq7XwhxFi/clipboard-normalization
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)
View all
The Daily
112,945 Listeners
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
132 Listeners
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
7,286 Listeners
Dwarkesh Podcast
540 Listeners
The Ezra Klein Show
16,338 Listeners
AI Article Readings
4 Listeners
Doom Debates
14 Listeners
LessWrong posts by zvi
2 Listeners