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