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Comment by madhadron

6 years ago

Windows and macOS do carry italics, strike-throughs, and the like through copy and paste. I think it's the tyranny of the teletype emulator that keeps us doing this. After all, why shouldn't we issue textual commands to a computer in a more sane environment?

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madhadron

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ilammy  6 years ago

> Windows and macOS do carry italics, strike-throughs, and the like through copy and paste.

There is no magic, they do it by literally exchanging HTML on the clipboard. Applications use it as a lingua franca and convert the text into whatever form they use internally.

  • orthoxerox  6 years ago

    HTML? Not RTF?

    • ilammy  6 years ago

      I'm not that sure about macOS, but on Windows that seems to be way more prevalent in my experience (had to deal with it when worked on clipboard redirection via RDP). The format also has some additional metadata embedded into it [1]. After all, Windows applications kinda pioneered "rich text" exchange via clipboard.

      [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/dataxchg/html...

      The format is actually negotiated by the communicating applications so it quite can be RTF too, depending on what formats the applications can produce and understand and the priorities they give to them.