paste as plain text

[lvmm]

• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct that this project adheres to.
• I have searched the issue tracker for a feature request that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
When draw.io pastes text into a diagram it pastes it as formatted text (i.e. with font, colour, etc), which is often not what is required. When I paste text into the text block, I usually want its formatting to match that of the existing text or the current diagram style, not the source document.

Describe the solution you'd like
I'd like to have a 'paste as plain text' option and hotkey e.g. ctrl-shift-v

Describe alternatives you've considered
Pasting text into a third program to strip formatting and then copy-pasting it into draw.io.

[stale]

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[davidjgraph]

Ctrl+Shift+V is paste without formatting.

[Hronom]

Please add an additional item in the right-click submenu to Paste as plain text e.g. like in Google Chrome browser.
Here is the screenshot:

Right now there are only Paste item that is persisting formating:

I'm very miss this menu. This is in addition to a hotkey combination.

[Hronom]

cc @davidjgraph please re-open this task. Really very needed, thanks!

For me personally it's a blocker for usage of drawio-desktop. (Yes I'm a mouse user)

[davidjgraph]

We have tens of millions of users, a blocker for one user doesn't get issued re-opened. I'm not re-opening for 2 votes.

But realistically, it hasn't been looked at for 3 years, it's not going to happen in the next 3 either.

[Hronom]

@davidjgraph is it a big effort for a maintainer? I can try to take a look, but I'm not familiar with code base

[Hronom]

By using ChatGPT I added it locally in the next way electron.js:

// Configure context menu for text fields
contextMenu({
	showCopyImage: false,
	showLookUpSelection: false,
	showSearchWithGoogle: false,
	showCopyLink: false,
	append: (defaultActions, params, browserWindow) => [
		{
			label: 'Paste as plain text',
			// Only show this item when there's a text in the clipboard
			visible: clipboard.availableFormats().includes('text/plain'),
			click: () => {
				// Execute the paste command in the focused window
				browserWindow.webContents.pasteAndMatchStyle();
			}
		}
	]
});

Checked locally and it seems like it works as expected:

However I don't like that it's added at the bottom of a menu, I expect to have it right after Paste item.
After reading README.md of electron-context-menu it seems like there is no nice way to add it right after Paste item without modification menu that is not recommended here.

I decided to ask the maintainers of electron-context-menu to add a parameter that can help to enable it without menu modification. Created ticket here sindresorhus/electron-context-menu#193

I don't know an Electron framework as the same as JavaScript, so for me it seems like we need to wait devs of electron-context-menu to introduce something like showPasteAndMatchStyle option, so we can use it and follow recommended approach.

[davidjgraph]

You're not understanding the point, we're not going to add a menu option because two people have asked for it. That's not how a large software project runs. We'd end up with hundreds of items in the context menu.

[Hronom]

@davidjgraph yes your statement is correct, but I'm not asking for a complete new feature. What I pointed out in this project as drawio-desktop miss feature parity with a web version of drawio. Others people probably just fallback to the web version(like I do).

That's not how a large software project runs. We'd end up with hundreds of items in the context menu.

Please don't be broad, Paste as plain text a pretty standard item in a right-click context menu.
Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have it(check my screenshots). I believe the user base of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox much more then drawio-desktop application and this browsers doesn't have a concern about this menu item.

So if we do not go broad and be specific to the ask - then we clearly see that Paste as plain text is a standard item available in modern browsers and other desktop applications like LibreOffice.

I really like draw.io and drawio-desktop a lot, so I wanna see drawio-desktop to be a good tool and make it support all capabilities that have a browser version as same as good platform integration with a system.

[davidjgraph]

Fair point, but I can't take openAI code, it's not production quality.

[Hronom]

@davidjgraph as an alternative we can wait for this ticket and then add it in drawio-desktop without dramatic changes in the code. (Please put like on that ticket).