One of my most-used buttons in email clients


It’s “Remove Formatting”. Sadly it’s often tucked away somewhere a little hard to reach:

Gmail

I use it when I’ve pasted text in and it comes in with weird formatting.

  • Maybe I copy-pasted from somewhere that used a table layout, and the email client thinks it should maintain that.
  • Maybe I copy-pasted from formatted text and the font-weight and font-style come along and I don’t want that.
  • Maybe for any reason at all I just want the text in the email to be “default” looking rather than have some kind of applied style.

One trick to preventing the need for this is to Paste and Match Style, which is a thing on Mac apps often:

Notice I’ve even got it mapped to have a nice keyboard shortcut. But sometimes I forget and sometimes it doesn’t work quite right, hence the “Remove Formatting”.

Front

I don’t know if I’d implore email clients to make it more prominent, as I have no idea how popular of a button it is, but certainly, if email clients made their UI more configurable, I’d move the button somewhere more prominent.


3 responses to “One of my most-used buttons in email clients”

  1. I almost always “paste with formatting” which can be done in Windows with CTRL+SHIFT+V (instead of just CTRL+V), which removes all formatting from the text. I use it so much, I almost think that should be the default paste functionality.

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