How to Paste Without Formatting on Mac

Copy from a web page, paste into an email, and suddenly your message has three fonts and a white text background. The fix ships with macOS: Paste and Match Style, on Shift+Option+Cmd+V, pastes the words and lets the destination decide the look. And if four keys is three too many, you can make plain paste the default behind ordinary Cmd+V.

The built-in shortcut

First, why this happens at all: when you copy from a rich source — a web page, a PDF, a styled document — the Mac clipboard carries several versions of the same content at once, including a fully formatted one and a plain-text one. Ordinary Paste prefers the formatted version; Paste and Match Style takes the plain text and dresses it in whatever style surrounds the insertion point.

In most Mac apps, the Edit menu holds both commands: Paste (Cmd+V), which brings along fonts, sizes, colors, and links, and Paste and Match Style (Shift+Option+Cmd+V), which inserts the text as if you had typed it there. Mail, Notes, Pages, Messages, Safari, and most third-party apps all support it.

The finger position is less awkward than it reads: Shift+Option+Cmd stack under your left hand, then V. Still, if you paste plain twenty times a day, remap it.

Make Cmd+V always paste plain

macOS lets you assign any menu command a shortcut of your choosing — including stealing Cmd+V for Paste and Match Style:

1. Open System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts…
2. Select App Shortcuts in the sidebar and click +.
3. Leave Application set to All Applications.
4. In Menu title, type Paste and Match Style — exactly, including capitalization.
5. Click into Keyboard shortcut, press Cmd+V, and click Done.

From now on, in any app whose Edit menu contains that exact command, Cmd+V triggers the plain version. Open any app's Edit menu to confirm — you'll see your shortcut now printed next to Paste and Match Style, which is exactly how the feature works: it rebinds menu items by their names. If you still occasionally want a formatted paste, add a second entry the same way: menu title Paste, shortcut Shift+Option+Cmd+V — the two commands simply swap keys.

To undo: return to App Shortcuts, select each entry you added, and click −. Everything reverts instantly.

Apps where the trick behaves differently

The remap works by matching the menu item's name, so apps that word it differently need their own entry (choose the specific app instead of All Applications):

• Microsoft Word uses Paste and Match Formatting.
• Excel and some others have no match-style command at all — they offer Paste Special dialogs instead, which a shortcut can't fully replace.
• Google Docs and other web editors aren't Mac apps at all — the menu remap can't reach inside a browser page. Docs has its own plain-paste shortcut, Cmd+Shift+V, which works regardless of your remap.
• Terminal always pastes plain text by nature; nothing to change.
• A few apps (some Electron-based) ignore App Shortcuts entirely; in those, the app's own keyboard settings are the place to look.

One more quirk worth knowing: Paste and Match Style matches the style at the insertion point. Paste into a heading and the text becomes heading-sized — that's the feature working as designed, not a bug.

Power users: the clipboard in Terminal

The clipboard is scriptable too — pbpaste always emits plain text, which makes pbpaste | pbcopy a one-line formatting stripper. See pbcopy and pbpaste on Mac.