PlainText: Stop Pasting Formatting
You Didn't Want

You copy a sentence from a website. You paste it into an email, a document, or a form field. And there it is — the wrong font, the wrong size, a background color you didn't ask for, maybe a hyperlink embedded in the middle. You didn't want any of that. You wanted the words.

PlainText is a Windows system-tray app that monitors the clipboard for rich text (HTML and RTF) and strips the formatting before you paste. It runs silently in the background, and every time you copy something with formatting, PlainText quietly replaces it with a clean, plain-text version. When you hit Ctrl+V, you get just the text.

Just want the download? The PlainText tool page has the features, install steps, and FAQ in one place.

How It Works

PlainText hooks into the Windows clipboard chain. When a clipboard change event fires and the clipboard contains HTML or RTF data alongside plain text, PlainText strips the rich formats and re-writes the clipboard with only the plain text version. The original text content is preserved — only the formatting metadata is removed.

This happens in milliseconds, between your Ctrl+C and your Ctrl+V. You won't notice it's running.

Two Modes

• Always On — every copy is automatically stripped. This is the default.
• Hotkey Only — PlainText only strips formatting when you use a configurable hotkey (default: Ctrl+Shift+V). Normal Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V behavior is untouched.

Switch between modes from the tray menu.

The Hotkey

Even in "Always On" mode, the hotkey is available. Press Ctrl+Shift+V to force-strip the current clipboard contents. In "Hotkey Only" mode, this is the only way PlainText activates. The hotkey is configurable in the settings.

Excluded Apps

Some applications — like Photoshop, Excel, or design tools — use the clipboard in ways where stripping formatting would break things. PlainText lets you define a list of excluded apps. When any excluded app is in the foreground, PlainText steps aside and leaves the clipboard alone.

Bonus: OCR

If you copy an image to the clipboard (a screenshot, a snip, a photo of text), PlainText can run OCR on it and replace the image with the extracted text. This uses Windows' built-in OCR engine — no external API, no internet connection required. Enable it from the tray menu under "OCR Mode."

Pause Without Quitting

Need to paste something with formatting intact? Right-click the tray icon and hit "Pause." PlainText stops processing clipboard events until you resume. No need to close and reopen the app.

Get PlainText

PlainText is free and open source. It requires Python 3.10+ on Windows 10 or 11.

Install

git clone https://github.com/VAROIndustries/PlainText.git
cd PlainText
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run

python plaintext.py

GitHub: VAROIndustries/PlainText

Check out more free tools and apps at varo.industries/apps.