Published on December 25, 2025 1:50 PM GMT
The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want
comfortable text:
Yes: Lists, links, blockquotes, code blocks, inline code, bold,
italics, underlining, headings, simple tables.
No: Colors, fonts, text sizing, text alignment, images, line
spacing.
Let’s say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog
post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font
size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:
If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at
all:
I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links
is a pain.
What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented
in Markdown. So I automated
this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard,
passes it through pandoc twice (HTML
to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the
clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:
You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:
$ normalize-clipboard
Which gives:
Alternatively, if I actually want Markdown, perhaps to paste into an
LLM interface, I can skip the conversion to HTML:
$ markdownify-clipboard
I’m pretty happy with this! It’s open source, on
github, so you’re welcome to give it a try if it would be useful
to you.
Note that I haven’t paid for an Apple Developer subscription, so if
you want to use the pre-built binaries you’ll need to click through
scary warnings in both your browser and the OS. I’ve documented these
in the README, though an advantage of building from source is that you
don’t have to deal with these.
This was my first time using Platypus to package a
script as a Mac app. It worked well!
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