Paste and Match Style Is Not the Answer

I think the overwhelming issue with Paste on macOS is that the *defaults* suck almost every time. In many cases Paste And Match Style is a far, far better default than Paste With Everything Imaginable but apps probably need a way to communicate with the system their preferences. I do not necessarily want 14 Paste command options, I want apps to be able to be smarter so they can communicate the most appropriate interpretations for their context and have a sensible default in every case.

@Kevin Grant

Totally agree - whenever I forget and just paste something into a document and see a jarring difference I have to undo and then invoke the paste and match style kb shortcut and I ALWAYS think. 'Why the hell isn't this the default?'

I agree with Marcin that PAMS is too much and I would like to preserve semantic info while dropping style info.

What's the actual state of the art here, though? Last time I looked at Mac pasteboard APIs (over 20 years ago!), the widely understood interchange options for text were rich text (everything) or plain text (nothing). I think what most people would actually want is something like markdown or a subset of HTML as an interchange format, which would preserve the semantics without the style. It seems like it would require every app to get on board with that and also provide affordances for when you do the default but change your mind and want to add styling or remove semantic markup.

FWIW Pure Paste on macOS is a really good clipboard style stripper from the Mac App Store, that has no user tracking of any sort.