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“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.
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