67142 - Ctrl+Shift+C keyboard shortcut for "copy as plain text"

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Jesse Ruderman]

I'd like a way to copy text straight from a webpage (or from editor) into a 
word processor without carrying over formatting.  Currently I open a notepad 
window, paste into the notepad window, copy from the notepad window, paste into 
the other app, and end up with a blank notepad window to close later.  This 
gets tedious rather quickly.

(Note: some of the time I do the notepad thing, I'm copying directly to a 
program that accepts only plain text anyway, but the app I'm pasting into also 
happens to have a command-line interface and I'm paranoid about bug 57770.)

How about adding a command to the Edit menu called "copy text" with the shortcut
Ctrl+Shift+C that copies only the plain-text version of the selected text to 
the clipboard?  "Cut text" and "paste text" might also be useful, but having 
both "copy text" and "paste text" on the menu might make it unclear that using 
just one of those new shortcuts is sufficient to force a plain-text copy.

Gregory <[e-mail]> brought this up in n.p.m.wishlist.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 64647, where PLairo suggested adding a "paste without formatting" 
option.  I like that wording better than my "paste text" (although it is 
slightly long).

Comment 2

[Peter Trudelle]

->xpapps

Comment 3

[Peter Trudelle]

really

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Should this really be keyboard navigation?  I'm also proposing adding an item 
to the edit menu, and possibly to the context menus for selections and 
textboxes.

Comment 5

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

if it's really an selection or editor issue, it should then go into either the
Selection or Editor component.

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

-> selection

Comment 7

[Kathleen :Brade]

This actually goes well with another bug in Composer (Paste As > xxx [dropdown 
list]).  Strictly speaking, I don't think this bug is a duplicate of #64647 since 
that complaint is focused on a specific problem in mail compose (not wanting a 
specific format (<pre>) on paste).  This bug seems to be a general issue of not 
putting any formatting on the clipboard.

Comment 8

[Brian Smith]

In Microsoft Word:
    Edit->Paste Special->Unformatted text
already does what you want.

I don't see the use for this feature. In general, Mozilla provides the clipboard
comments as both HTML and unformatted text at the same time. Adding a seperate
"Copy as text" feature seems useless.

Comment 9

[Jesse Ruderman]

Marking wontfix based on Brian's comment that "paste without formatting" is 
available in most apps that can take both text and formatted text, making "copy 
without formatting" redundant.