Editor

Paste

Paste

outl has two paste modes, and both do more than drop raw text into a block. The goal is that whatever you copied — a Slack message, a Google Doc paragraph, an outline from another app, a chat reply — lands as a tidy outline in outl, not as a wall of unformatted text or a mess of stray characters.

  • Paste with formatting converts the clipboard into outl markdown: rich formatting is kept, bullet structure becomes a real outline, and plain prose is split into one block per paragraph.
  • Paste without formatting splices the raw clipboard text into the current block verbatim — no conversion, no splitting.

The chords are per-client; the full table lives in Shortcuts. In short: desktop Cmd/Ctrl+V (with) and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+V (without); TUI p (with) and Shift+P (without); mobile is always with formatting.

Paste with formatting

This is the default paste (Cmd/Ctrl+V, TUI p, every mobile paste). It picks one of three routes, in order:

  1. Rich clipboard (text/html). When you copy from an app that carries formatting — Slack, Google Docs, Notion, Gmail — the bold/italic/links/lists live in the clipboard’s text/html flavour, while text/plain is stripped of them. outl reads the HTML and converts it to outl markdown, so the formatting survives: **bold**, *italic*, [text](url), - bullets, ~~strikethrough~~, and inline code all come across. Custom emoji pasted as an image (Slack renders :bus: as <img alt=":bus:">) keep their :shortcode:. Editors that encode weight as inline CSS instead of <b> (Google Docs above all) are handled too: a font-weight:700 span becomes **bold**, and the non-bold <b> wrapper Docs wraps the whole message in does not bold the entire block.

  2. Structured plain text. With no richer HTML, if the clipboard is already an outline (lines starting with - ) or has multiple paragraphs, it is routed through the conversion pipeline. An outline keeps its hierarchy; multi-paragraph prose (a pasted chat reply, an email) becomes one block per paragraph instead of a single wall-of-text block. Markdown copied from another outliner (Roam, Logseq, a GitHub task list) is normalised to the outl dialect on the way in. The full syntax-translation table is in Markdown dialect → External paste.

  3. Trivial text. A single word, a URL, one line — spliced into the block in place, no round-trip, so a routine paste stays instant.

The routing decision is one shared function, choosePasteRoute, so the desktop and mobile clients can never disagree about what a given clipboard should do.

Paste without formatting

Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+V (desktop) and Shift+P (TUI) paste the raw clipboard text with no conversion: the text is spliced into the current block as-is, and outline-looking or multi-paragraph content is not split. Use it when you want the literal characters — a code snippet, a block of text whose line breaks matter, markdown you want to keep as source rather than render.

Mobile has no without-formatting chord; every mobile paste is with formatting.

Pasting inside a code block

When the block you are editing is a fenced code block (a ``` block), every paste is literal — the same as paste-without-formatting — regardless of the chord you use. A multi-line or outline-shaped clipboard is spliced in verbatim, with its line breaks intact, instead of being converted into sibling blocks (which would tear the fence apart and strand the closing ``` on its own line). This holds on both GUI clients (desktop and mobile), because the guard lives next to the shared choosePasteRoute decision.

Under the hood

The behaviour is shared across clients so it stays identical everywhere:

  • choosePasteRoute(html, plain) (@outl/shared/paste) — the rich / structured / native decision, shared by desktop and mobile.
  • htmlToOutlMarkdown(html) (@outl/shared/paste) — the text/html → outl markdown conversion, built on Turndown tuned for the outl dialect.
  • outl_actions::paste_markdown — with-formatting: normalises external syntax, detects outline shape, splits paragraphs, and grafts the result as blocks through the op log.
  • outl_actions::paste_plain — without-formatting: raw text as one block, no normalisation or splitting.

The TUI reads the OS clipboard directly (arboard) and runs the same outl_actions pipeline; it has no text/html flavour to convert, so rich-clipboard conversion is a GUI-only capability. On the desktop, paste-without-formatting (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+V) reads the clipboard through the Tauri clipboard-manager plugin (backend arboard), not navigator.clipboard.readText(). The macOS webview gates that web API behind a native “Paste” permission button when it is called outside a real paste gesture, so the plugin read is what makes the chord work. See the Shared primitives catalog for where each piece lives.