Getting Started with Paste Plain Text

Learn how to set up Paste Plain Text for Mac and start pasting clean, unformatted text everywhere.

Paste Plain Text is a simple utility that strips formatting from text on your clipboard. It removes fonts, sizes, colours, bold, italic, highlights, and all other styling so you can paste clean, plain text into any app.

Launching the App

Paste Plain Text runs as a menu bar app. After launching, you will see its icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen.

The app works in the background and requires no additional setup. By default, automatic mode is enabled, which means every piece of text you copy is instantly stripped of formatting before you paste it.

How It Works

When Paste Plain Text is running, it monitors your clipboard. Depending on the mode you choose, it either strips formatting automatically or waits for you to trigger it manually.

What Gets Stripped

Paste Plain Text removes all rich text formatting, including:

  • Font family and font size
  • Bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough
  • Text colour and background highlights
  • Links and hyperlink styling
  • List formatting and indentation
  • Any other embedded styling

Only the raw text content is kept.

Click the Paste Plain Text icon in the menu bar to access:

  • Paste as Plain Text -- strip formatting from the current clipboard contents on demand.
  • Settings -- open the Settings panel.
  • Launch at Login -- toggle whether the app starts automatically when your Mac boots up.
  • Quit Paste Plain Text -- close the app entirely.

For the best experience, enable both Automatically Clear Formatting and Launch at Login. This way, Paste Plain Text starts with your Mac and silently strips formatting from everything you copy without any manual intervention.

Performance

Paste Plain Text is extremely lightweight. It runs quietly in the background and uses virtually no CPU or memory.

Troubleshooting

The app is not running after restarting my Mac

Open Settings and enable Launch at Login so the app starts automatically.

The menu bar icon is missing

Open Settings and make sure Show in Menu Bar is enabled. If you cannot access Settings, relaunch the app from your Applications folder.