PlainPaste
A tiny Mac menu bar app that pastes as plain text. No formatting, ever.
You copy something from a web page or a document, paste it, and drag along the fonts, colors and sizes you never asked for. PlainPaste fixes that two ways:
- Hit ⌃⌘V — pastes the clipboard as plain text, in any app.
- Click the clipboard icon → Scrub Clipboard — strips the formatting off whatever is on the clipboard, then paste normally with ⌘V.
Installing
- Unzip, and drag PlainPaste.app into your Applications folder.
- Open it. macOS will likely refuse the first time — this is a small unsigned app, not from the App Store. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. That's a one-time step.
- A clipboard icon appears in the menu bar. The first time you use ⌃⌘V, macOS asks for an Accessibility grant — that's what lets the app press ⌘V for you. (Scrubbing from the menu needs no permission at all.)
Tick Launch at Login in the menu so it's always there. The icon flashes a checkmark whenever it scrubs.
For scripters
Anything on your Mac can trigger a scrub:
notifyutil -p us.philipbaker.plainpaste.scrub —
handy from Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, or a shell script.
What it doesn't do
No clipboard history, no network, no analytics, no background snooping — it reads the clipboard only at the moment you trigger it. The whole app is one Swift file.