Paste as Plain Text on Mac: The Shortcut, and Making It Default

#The shortcut, and what it actually does

To paste as plain text on a Mac, hold Option, Shift and Command together and press V. On the keyboard that is the four-key press written as ⌥⇧⌘V. The menu command is called Paste and Match Style, and you will find it under the Edit menu of most apps, sitting right below the ordinary Paste.

The wording matters more than it looks. It does not simply delete formatting. It matches the style of the place you are pasting into. Copy a bold red 20-point heading from a web page, put your cursor inside a plain paragraph, and Paste and Match Style hands you the words in that paragraph's font, size and color. Copy the same heading into a bulleted list, and it takes the list's style instead. Plain Command+V, by contrast, carries the source styling with it, which is why your document suddenly grows a stray font.

If you only ever needed one line from this page, that is it. The rest exists because the shortcut is not universal, and the day it fails you it fails silently: nothing pastes as plain text, and macOS gives you no hint why.

#Why the shortcut changes between apps

Option+Shift+Command+V is the Apple convention. Apps built on Apple's own text frameworks inherit it for free, so it is consistent across TextEdit, Notes, Mail, Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Step outside that family and the picture fragments, because each app ships its own Edit menu and picks its own key.

Menu names verified in current builds as of September 2026; apps rename these commands more often than you would think, so trust your own Edit menu over any table.

So the honest answer to "what is the plain text paste shortcut on Mac" is: it depends on the app. There are two shortcuts you will hit most, ⌥⇧⌘V and ⌘⇧V, and the fastest way to learn which one an app uses is to open its Edit menu and read the shortcut printed next to the paste commands. That habit beats memorizing a list, because the list goes stale. If the whole copy-and-paste flow on macOS still feels inconsistent to you, I wrote a plain-language walk-through in how to copy on a Mac.

#How to make plain-text paste the default

If you paste plain text far more often than formatted text, the extra two modifier keys get old. macOS lets you rebind Paste and Match Style onto plain Command+V, so the ordinary paste becomes the clean one. It is a built-in setting, no extra software:

1. Open System Settings, then Keyboard.
2. Click Keyboard Shortcuts, then App Shortcuts in the sidebar.
3. Click the + button. For Application, pick the specific app you want, for example Mail. Leaving it on All Applications is tempting but unreliable, and I explain why below.
4. In Menu Title, type the command name exactly as it appears in that app's Edit menu, most often Paste and Match Style.
5. Click in the Keyboard Shortcut field and press Command+V. Click Done.

From then on, Command+V in that app pastes as plain text, and the formatted paste moves to whatever combination you leave free. Two caveats keep this from being a set-and-forget fix. First, the Menu Title has to match the real command character for character, so an app that names the command "Paste without formatting" or "Paste Text Only" will ignore a shortcut you filed under "Paste and Match Style". Second, All Applications rarely works cleanly, precisely because the command is named differently across apps, so you end up adding the shortcut app by app for the handful where you actually care.

There is a real trade-off here worth naming: once Command+V pastes plain in an app, you have given up the easy way to paste with formatting there. For a Mail client or a chat app that is usually a fair swap. For a writing app where you sometimes want the source styling, think twice before you remap.

#The trick that never fails

Every method above depends on the destination app cooperating. When an app has no plain-text paste at all, or you just copied something with formatting so stubborn that even Match Style leaves traces, you can clean the clipboard itself. Two tiny command-line tools ship with every Mac: pbcopy reads text and puts it on the clipboard, and pbpaste prints whatever text is on the clipboard. Pipe one into the other:

# strip all formatting from whatever you just copied
pbpaste | pbcopy

pbpaste emits only the plain-text representation of the clipboard, and pbcopy writes it back with nothing else attached. After you run that line, the clipboard holds the same words with every font, color, link and style gone, and a normal Command+V anywhere pastes it clean. It is the closest thing to a guarantee in this whole topic, because it operates on the clipboard before any app sees it.

You do not have to open Terminal each time. Wrap the same line in a Quick Action with Automator's Run Shell Script step, then assign it a keyboard shortcut in System Settings, and you have a system-wide "strip formatting" hotkey that works in apps with no plain-text paste of their own. It is more setup than the built-in shortcut, but it covers the cases the built-in shortcut cannot reach.

#Where a clipboard manager comes in

If you are already reaching for plain-text paste several times an hour, the underlying problem is often that you cannot see or control what your clipboard is holding. macOS keeps exactly one item and shows you nothing about it. A clipboard manager keeps a history and, in many cases, lets you paste any past item as plain text on purpose.

Two worth knowing, both of which I compared in more depth elsewhere on this site. Maccy is a free, open-source clipboard history that stores your copies as plain text by default, which sidesteps the formatting problem for most everyday pasting. Paste is a polished commercial option with a visual board and pinboards, aimed at people who copy constantly. Neither is a magic bullet, but if the plain-text dance is a daily annoyance, the fix might be a better clipboard rather than a better shortcut. For the broader picture of how copying, history and pasting fit together on macOS, the Mac clipboard guide is the deeper read.

That is also the honest place to say what plain-text paste is not. It is not a security feature and it does not sanitize hidden data. It strips visible styling, not tracking parameters in a link or invisible characters in a code snippet. If you are pasting a URL you want clean, plain text keeps the tracking query string intact; that is a different job for a different tool.

#Frequently asked questions