Smart Paste in Ulysses

I just found a new Ulysses feature by accident: Cmd+V pastes, of course, but Shift+Cmd+V pastes with a quick-format menu: you can pick from the following

  1. Paste – this is what you normally get when you hit Cmd+V. The paste behaviour depends on what Ulysses detects on the clipboard. For the example below, if it’s a hyperlink it will by default give it link markup
  2. Text – this pastes the clipboard contents as plain text, naturally, with no markup
  3. Code – this pastes the content in a code block, i.e. so you can get automatic syntax highlighting, it exports to HTML <code> tags, etc.
  4. Source – this pastes the content as “raw source” which, to the best of my understanding, is Ulysses markup for “export this exactly as it appears without trying to interpret its contents as markup” 🤔

This feature is called “Smart Paste”, and it’s documented here: https://ulysses.app/tutorials/smart-copy-paste

Here’s what it looks like when you paste a hyperlink in each format:

You can see that the default paste inferred the link’s display text from the page name! That’s interesting.

You can either select your format with the arrow keys and press ENTER, or hit the associated number key and it will paste in the associated format.