January 2, 2026
Paste Wars: Bold vs Bare
Show HN: I built a clipboard tool to strip/keep specific formatting like Italics
Mac users beg, skeptics shout 'just a script', smart‑quote purists clap back
TLDR: A new Windows app formats text as you paste, promising local, private cleanup and a lifetime deal. The crowd is split between “just use scripts,” privacy worries, and requests for a Mac version, with a surprise tussle over the beauty of smart quotes vs. stripping punctuation.
A Windows tool called CustomPaste wants to turn the humble paste into a power move, promising to keep bold text and links, or go full “executioner mode” and strip everything. It runs locally, works offline, and there’s even a New Year lifetime deal. But the crowd didn’t just copy that vibe—they pasted in opinions with extra spice.
The loudest take: “This is a feature, not a product.” Critics say you can do all this with AutoHotKey (a Windows scripting tool) and open-source apps, and they’re uneasy about any third-party app watching the clipboard, where passwords and private notes often live. Supporters counter with polish, ease-of-use, and the convenience of recipes you can apply anywhere with a hotkey.
Then came the culture war: smart quotes. One commenter swooned, “I write with smart quotes… it’s beautiful,” while others cheered the app’s ability to “fix AI text” by flattening fancy punctuation. Meanwhile, the Mac crowd crashed the party asking for a version on macOS, and another chorus begged, “Can’t this just be baked into Windows?”
So yes, Ctrl+V got a glow-up, but the thread turned into a showdown: power user hacks vs. paid polish, privacy paranoia vs. local-only promises, and the eternal question—bold or bare?
Key Points
- •CustomPaste is a Windows clipboard utility that applies user-defined recipes to clean and format text on paste.
- •Users can preserve specific formatting (e.g., bold, hyperlinks) or force plain text, and set a recipe as the default for Ctrl+V.
- •A Quick Menu allows applying saved recipes from any app via hotkey or mouse, without opening the main dashboard.
- •Features include deduping lines, sorting, case conversions, smart quote/em-dash conversion, emoji removal, and whitespace cleanup.
- •The app operates 100% locally with no cloud processing or data collection, works offline, and is offered with a free trial and a discounted lifetime license.