Uneasy Rhetoric

Lifehacker posts about a Windows utility called PureText that sits in your Windows tray and lets you define a keystroke combination to paste unformatted text. Currently, such an action must be done via the Edit menu in most programs.

This is a cool function, and kudos to the programmer. But I need yet another widgety thingy clogging up my system tray like I need another hole in my head. This functionality - a keyboard shortcut that pastes unformatted text - should be built in to programs like MS-Word. I shouldn’t need a special program, I shouldn’t need to define a custom key sequence, it should be right there.

Anyone who spends any amount of time cutting and pasting text like I do (I work with a lot of boilerplate) knows that formatting can get lost, changed, or just plain screwed up between Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Or, the formatting in document A is not the formatting you want or need in document B. As a result, I spend a lot of time navigating through the Edit menu.

Word is bloatware, sure. But on the list of Word functions I use, this is right up there in the top 10, and, given that someone felt the need to write this little program in the first place, I’m obviously not the only one who does a lot of “Paste Special.”