Option to always paste as plain text

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi, I would like to have an option to always paste selected text as plain 
text so I made a small patch to add that functionality and it's attached to 
this message.

If possible, I would like to see it in the next version since I believe it's 
a feature that would be good for other people.

-- Antonio Dias

Original issue reported on code.google.com by accd...@gmail.com on 14 Apr 2010 at 5:12

Attachments:

• mintty-0.6.1-paste-as-plain-text-option.patch.gz

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The suggested option is misnamed, because it affects copying not pasting. 
Pasting 
into mintty always uses plain text, for obvious reasons. Also, enabling the 
option by 
default is rather presumptuous.

What's the use case for this? As you've seen, mintty copies the text both as 
plain 
text and as rich text. It's up to the application you paste into to decide 
which 
version to use. Programs like text editors, terminals or web browsers use the 
plain 
text version, whereas word processors tend to use the rich text version, at 
least by 
default. Microsoft Office programs offer a dropdown option when pasting rich 
text, 
where you can choose to insert it as plain text instead.

Finally, there's no indication so far that anyone else would find this useful. 
Mintty 
has been around for a little while now, and quite a lot of people do use it, 
yet this 
is the first time that this has been requested.

Original comment by andy.koppe on 14 Apr 2010 at 5:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

After that clarification I agree it's misnamed and left it on by default was a 
mistake. My bad.

Me and colleagues at HP Enterprise Services do a lot of copy & past from mintty 
into 
instant messaging clients and most of time we find us copying from mintty, 
pasting 
into notepad, copying back and pasting again into instant messaging windows 
just to 
have formatting left out and use the plain text version of the clipboard. It's 
dumb 
and annoying but it's the way we use it most of the time.

Yes, I agree that there's no indication of other persons looking for this 
option and 
I didn't state that. What I said is that I believe that it is an option that if 
present MAY be used by others.

Anyway, I'm glad to have your feedback and I still thinking it will be great to 
have 
some option that implement that behavior.

-- Antonio Dias

Original comment by accd...@gmail.com on 14 Apr 2010 at 6:00

[GoogleCodeExporter]

So why is pasting rich text into the IM client a problem? And is it a 
particular IM 
client that's affected?

Original comment by andy.koppe on 14 Apr 2010 at 6:12

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Andy,

For most users it may not be a problem at all. Maybe it's just the way we do it 
here 
in my group. That patch was very welcome over here so I thought sending it to 
the 
mainstream would be a good idea. Seems like it was not and I'm not, in anyway, 
against your position to not include it at all into the mainstream mintty. As I 
said 
it is just a feature that solved a minor problem (for my local work group, at 
least) 
and you can disregard it as you wish. I can maintain it as a patch for my group 
only. 
That's a small effort and I can handle it.

Over here we have Microsoft Office Communicator, Google Talk and Microsoft 
Messenger 
but the majority uses Office Communicator.

-- Antonio Dias

Original comment by accd...@gmail.com on 14 Apr 2010 at 6:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Sorry if my questions came across as rather brusque, but I really did want to 
know why 
pasting rich text into the IM client is a problem, to try and judge whether 
it's worth 
adding an option for this. (Yes, I do try to avoid adding options if I can.)

Original comment by andy.koppe on 14 Apr 2010 at 6:39

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Never mind. Maybe is this English reader wannabe that interpreted it wrong. As 
I said 
I'm glad to have you spending some of your time on this.

-- Antonio Dias

Original comment by accd...@gmail.com on 14 Apr 2010 at 7:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'd still like to hear what goes wrong when pasting rich text into IM clients.

Original comment by andy.koppe on 14 Apr 2010 at 7:59

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Formatting is not always correct and end of lines are marked by a block 
character. 
These are the main annoyances we see over here. Colors, bold and all other 
formatting 
we see in mintty are not required most of the time so we ended doing that copy, 
paste 
in notepad, copy, paste in IM thing. Minor issues for irrelevant people. 
Please, 
disregard my request at all. That option is not needed in the mainstream mintty 
as you 
pointed out.

Original comment by accd...@gmail.com on 15 Apr 2010 at 1:41

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hmm, that black block thing happens in some applications, e.g. Wordpad, but not 
others, 
e.g. OpenOffice. Needs investigating on whether the attributes on newlines are 
being 
set wrongly.

Anyway, I realised that PuTTY did have an option for this, so I decided to 
resurrect it 
as "Copy as rich text", defaulting to enabled. r847 on trunk.

Original comment by andy.koppe on 18 Apr 2010 at 6:54

• Changed state: Fixed
• Added labels: Difficulty-Easy, Milestone-0.7, Priority-Low

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fixed the black block thing in r848 on trunk.

Original comment by andy.koppe on 18 Apr 2010 at 7:41

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks, Andy.

Original comment by accd...@gmail.com on 18 Apr 2010 at 9:49

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by andy.koppe on 3 May 2010 at 7:43

• Changed state: Verified

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks a ton Andy!!!  I was applying this patch manually for a while (which 
sucked in different versions), but I see it's built-in now.  I know it sounds 
strange to you, but I really relied on pasting in clear text because I use bash 
and use colors for everything.

There are many things I look for in a terminal and you cover most of them 
(probably 99.9%).  If you added these, it would bring it to 100:

-- tabbed windows
-- option to set my own word delimiter characters

I know, I know, you already said "No tabbed windows" (I thought I saw that in 
another thread).  I use WindowTabs (www.windowtabs.com) - found that some time 
ago, probably in the same thread, so it's not a necessity for me.

You did a great job with this one - You can definitely count on me using it....

Sean McDaniel
(Morpheous1129)

Original comment by morpheou...@gmail.com on 15 Sep 2010 at 10:25

[GoogleCodeExporter]

You're welcome, but adding enhancement requests in comments for unrelated 
issues is not. See issue 8 for tabs and issue 120 (and 0.9-beta1) for the word 
selection characters.

Original comment by andy.koppe on 16 Sep 2010 at 4:53

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks Andy!!  Just saw you had replied to my post.  Didn't mean for it to be 
an enhancement request.  I actually didn't expect anything done about it.  
Thanks a ton - it's perfect!!!

-Sean
(Morpheous1129)

Original comment by morpheou...@gmail.com on 16 Feb 2012 at 12:36