User interface techniques
Copying Text Without the Horrible Formatting
Have you ever copied some text off a web page or a document and then gone to paste it in another document or spreadsheet only to find some horribly formatted hypertext pasted in for some bizarre reason, then had to go through the hassle of trying to figure out how to remove the formatting?
Have you ever used Putty or another SSH client that automatically copies highlighted text to the copy buffer and allows pasting with a middle click and wished all programs were this smart?
Has anyone, ever, in the history of using a computer, WANTED to paste formatted text from a web page or drop some idiotic OLE object into their FrameMaker document? I know I’ve never once wanted that to happen.
Tonight I had to copy a 100 or so mac addresses out of a DHCP list from the web interface of pfSense into an Excel table and each damn time I got stupid formatting and then had to select the cell, select the drop down menu for paste options, select paste as text, repeat. Holy crap, what the hell were they thinking? No clue.
None of the paste solutions recommended for Excel worked for me and OpenOffice/Libre were just as screwed up. But I found some solutions for the copy side for Windows. Some of the plugins should work on Linux. If you’re using a Mac, The Steve has already decided how your work is permitted to look and the Apple goons will probably break your fingers if you try to modify formatting.
- Auto Copy makes Chrome on windowz almost as efficient as a linux application! Copy as text, select to copy. Middle click to paste. Dang. But it doesn’t seem to always remove formatting (select to copy works reliably though).
- Copy as Plain text fixes this stupidity on Firefox.
- UPDATE: Márton Anka is an awesome developer who writes some of the best code on the internet and his plugin PLAINCOPY, is an excellent solution.
- Autocopy2 adds the incredibly useful select to copy to Firefox. Once you get used to it, you’ll be frustrated with applications that don’t support it.
- This edit to maker.ini will prefer pasting plain text (or now UTF8) over OLE2, eliminating that horror from FrameMaker.
It turns out there’s a universal solution for Windows.
- PureText removes formatting from text on the clipboard and pastes it with an alternate key command (like Windows-V), so even copying from word documents to excel isn’t a horrible nightmare of tedium.
I haven’t yet figured out how to copy images from Firefox to Thunderbird without pasting it as a reference to the original image. Pasting an HTML reference to remote content means the recipient either doesn’t see the image (because they don’t auto-load remote content or because they don’t have permission to load it or aren’t on-line when they read their mail) or Thunderbird makes a request to the referenced site to load the media creating a privacy violating log entry. The most convenient solution I’ve found is to paste the image into irfanview first and then copy from there into Thunderbird.
Category: HowTo • Technology
How to Disable CTL-Return in Thunderbird
One of the stupidest keyboard shortcuts I’ve run into is Thunderbirds CTRL-Return automatic send function. Maybe I type sloppy, but I frequently CTRL-V to paste a link into a message and hit return just a little too fast to continue typing and, damn it, the embarrassing, incomplete message is gone.
It turns out I’m not the only one. I found this great link
https://web.archive.org/web/20091126055634/http://blogs.sun.com:80/LetTheSunShineIn/entry/changing_thunderbird_keyboard_shortcut
which has, itself, a link to a pretty cool plugin that lets you remap the keyboard shortcuts.
http://mozilla.dorando.at/keyconfig.xpi
But it does not (at least with Thunderbird 3.1.4 on window) list the dreaded ctrl-enter stupidkey. Now windows 7 search is astonishingly stupid (how come windows, 20 years on, still can’t give a marginal search function when back in 1990 OnLocation could return every file on my Mac, including searching by content, in a few milliseconds? Progress my ass) but I found the right “prefs.js” (eventually) at C:\Users\dgessel\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\mwwkrsno.default.
As I’d modified a few keyboard commands with keyconfig already, prefs.js had a nice friendly indicator of where I should insert my own guerrilla modification (about the middle of the file) and there I pasted in
user_pref(“keyconfig.main.key_send”, “!][][“);
and when I launched Thunderbird, ctrl-enter was disabled. YAY!
(The following message was a “note to self” – I typed ctrl-enter and…)
Yep. Message still here… doesn’t work.
(…noted that the message was not sent thus ctrl-enter no longer works. The fix, therefore, does work.)
If you want to customize your experience, there’s a nice command reference here
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyconfig_extension:_Thunderbird
I added CTL-ALT-RETURN as “send later” which I don’t think I’ll hit accidentally.
Category: Linux • Technology
-
Recent Posts
- Goodbye, Tortuga. 2024 April 25
- A one page home/new tab page with random pictures, time, and weather 2024 April 11
- Putting ccache on a backed RAM disk to speed compiles 2024 March 16
- Audio File Analysis With Sox 2024 February 07
- Manually Update Time Zone Data on Android 10 2023 October 31
- Autodictating to self using Whisper to preserve privacy 2023 August 17
- Projecting Qubit Realizations to the Cryptopocalpyse Date 2023 August 04
- AI PSYOPS are changing strategic messaging 2023 July 29
- Convert A Slideshow/Presentation into HTML 5 Video 2023 July 23
- Mobotix Notifier in Python – get desktop messages from your cameras 2023 June 06
- Categories
- Links
- Search
- Archives
- Post History