Free Windows Tool

Paste Without Formatting.
Every Time.

PlainText watches your clipboard for rich text (HTML/RTF) and strips the formatting before you paste — no wrong fonts, no surprise background colors, no embedded hyperlinks. Just the words.

Get PlainText on GitHub Read the Launch Post
FreeOpen SourceWindows 10 / 11Built-In OCR

The Problem

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 runs silently in the system tray. Every time you copy something with formatting, it quietly replaces it with a clean, plain-text version — in milliseconds, between your Ctrl+C and your Ctrl+V. When you paste, you get just the text.

PlainText system tray menu on Windows

Features

Two Modes
Always On strips every copy automatically (the default). Hotkey Only leaves normal copy-paste untouched and strips only on demand.
Force-Strip Hotkey
Press Ctrl+Shift+V (configurable) to strip the current clipboard contents on demand — available in both modes.
Excluded Apps
Photoshop, Excel, and design tools use the clipboard in special ways. Add them to the exclusion list and PlainText steps aside when they're in the foreground.
OCR for Images
Copy a screenshot and PlainText can replace it with the extracted text, using Windows' built-in OCR — no external API, fully offline.
Pause Without Quitting
Need formatting intact for one paste? Hit Pause in the tray menu, paste, then resume. No restart needed.
Text Preserved
Only the formatting metadata is removed — the original text content is always preserved exactly as copied.

Install

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

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

Source and documentation: github.com/VAROIndustries/PlainText

FAQ

How do I paste without formatting on Windows?
Some apps support Ctrl+Shift+V for plain-text paste, but many don't, and web forms and desktop apps behave inconsistently. PlainText solves it at the source: it strips HTML and RTF formatting from the clipboard itself, in milliseconds, between your Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V — so a normal paste is plain text in every application.
Can I still paste with formatting when I want it?
Yes, three ways: hit Pause in the tray menu to stop processing temporarily, switch to Hotkey Only mode so formatting is stripped only when you press the hotkey (default Ctrl+Shift+V), or add specific applications to the excluded apps list so PlainText steps aside whenever they're in the foreground.
Will PlainText break copy-paste in Excel or Photoshop?
No — that's what the excluded apps list is for. Apps like Photoshop, Excel, or design tools use the clipboard in ways where stripping formatting would break things, so when any excluded app is in the foreground PlainText leaves the clipboard alone.
Can PlainText extract text from a screenshot?
Yes. With OCR Mode enabled, copying an image to the clipboard (a screenshot, a snip, a photo of text) runs OCR on it and replaces the image with the extracted text. It uses Windows' built-in OCR engine — no external API, no internet connection required.

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Working with AI output? See PlainText for Claude — a companion tool that squishes multi-line AI output into a single clean line.