Plain Clip 2.5.2

What is Plain Clip?

Plain Clip is a tiny application that removes formatting from text which is on the clipboard. (The clipboard—also known as pasteboard—is the place where data is stored to when you copy anything and of course it's also the place where data is read from when you paste anything).

A simple example: When you copy “Plain Clip” from this Readme file and paste it (either by pressing ⌘V or by selecting “Edit” ➔ “Paste” from the menubar) into Apple’s “TextEdit” application, you will of course get “Plain Clip”. But if you run Plain Clip and, after that, paste the clipboard contents, you’ll get an unformatted “Plain Clip” instead.

At first glance, this might look useless, but there are many cases where the text formatting (and / or any additional information that’s copied, such as file icons) does not have any use, but is rather an obstacle. Imagine you want to copy the names of a few files you have selected in the Finder and paste them into an e-mail using Apple’s “Mail” application. If you do so, you will not get the filenames, but “Mail” will attach those files to the mail. Sometimes this is the desired behaviour, but frequently it is not—hence, in these cases, you simply launch Plain Clip, paste and have the filenames instead of the mail attachments.

As plaintext is often preferable, more and more macOS applications have added a “Paste and Match Style” command which strips formatting. But this is not available in every application, and it does necessarily produce real plaintext. Example: even if you use “Paste and Match Style” in the “Mail” application, a copied file will be inserted as an attachment and not as a filename. This is where Plain Clip differs: it works regardless of the application, and it produces raw text, with some optional cleaning on top (see below).

Using Plain Clip

Plain Clip is a so-called “faceless” application. This means that it has no user interface (windows, menus etc.) at all and when you doubleclick it, it won’t appear in the dock. You will only notice that it has done its work by comparing the clipboard contents before and afterwards.

If Plain Clip is not able to convert the clipboard contents to a plain string (for instance, because it’s an image and not text), it won’t change the clipboard and play the system alert sound instead.

Additional text cleaning features

Plain Clip offers optional text cleaning features that can be set in the preferences. To open the preferences, please keep the Shift (⇧) key pressed while launching Plain Clip. You will see this dialog:

By default, all of the options are disabled.

Plain Clip & hotkey utilities

The main reason why Plain Clip is a faceless application is that it launches fast and that it can be easily triggered by hotkey utilites / shortcut managers such as Spark or iKey. If you use any application of this kind, you will probably want to add a shortcut to invoke Plain Clip. You can either launch the application as usual, or—if you prefer different shortcuts for different types of cleaning—start a shell script that’s included with Plain Clip to which you can pass the desired switches.

That shell script is in the top level of the Plain Clip application bundle. Hence, if Plain Clip is in the general Applications folder, its path is /Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc. You can pass one or more of the following optional switches to the script:

Without any options, it simply converts the clipboard’s contents to plaintext.

For instance, to do the conversion and remove trailing whitespace, call the script as …
'/Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc' -w
… or …
/Applications/Plain\ Clip.app/pc
(Due to the space in the application’s name, you either have to use a backslash or single quotes.)

If however, your preferred hotkey manager does not support calling shell scripts, but can execute AppleScript code, you can wrap the script call in AppleScript like this:
do shell script "'/Applications/Plain Clip.app/pc' -w"

Price

Plain Clip is freeware. However, if you appreciate it and would like to send a “Thank you”, there are a number of ways to do that. Please take a look at my website for mor information.

What is new in version 2.5.2?

Plain Clip 2.5.2 was released on 10/18/2018.

Contact / Feedback

Carsten Blüm, macapps@bluem.net
Plain Clip Homepage

Disclaimer

Use this software at your own risk. If for some obscure reason any damage or data loss may arise from using it (which in my opinion is nearly impossible), it’s nobody elses problem than yours.