Copy and paste without color and underline
 

When I select text from an OF item, copy it, and paste it into, say TextEdit, it pastes fine. But if I copy several items together, copy and paste, the text shows up as a hyperlink underlined and in blue.

Is there some way to turn that off? I never need to paste anything as a link, I'd like to be able to copy several items and paste them as plain text. How can I do this?

There's no way to turn it off, and you're actually doing two different things.

In the first case, you undoubtedly selected only the text of the action, not the entire row. When you copy and paste, you get exactly what you expect.

In the second case, to do the selection, you are actually selecting multiple rows in their entirety, and when you copy and paste an entire row, OmniFocus puts a link to the row in the clipboard, with the display name of the link being the text of the action. If you copy and paste multiple rows, you get a bunch of links, as you discovered.

If you want to copy just the text of multiple rows, you could use an Applescript like the one included here.

[code]
tell application "OmniFocus"
tell front document
tell (first document window whose index is 1)
set theSelectedItems to selected trees of content
set indx to count items of theSelectedItems
if indx is 0 then
display dialog "Please select one or more rows and try again"
return
end if

set clipboardText to ""
repeat while indx > 0
set selectedItem to value of item indx of theSelectedItems
set clipboardText to name of selectedItem & return & clipboardText
set indx to indx - 1
end repeat
set the clipboard to clipboardText
end tell
end tell
end tell
[/code]

You can also select 'Edit>Paste and Match Style' in TextEdit rather than just pasting the formatted clipboard contents with links.

Thanks, but I tried that ... and it didn't work for me.

You can paste into a plain text window to get what you're after. In TextEdit, you can switch your window to plain text with Format->Make Plain Text (Shift-Command-T).

You could also always paste into something which [B]only[/B] understands plain text, like Terminal. Hmm… Come to think of it, speaking of Terminal… You can also use this Terminal command to convert the current pasteboard to plain text:

[CODE]pbpaste | pbcopy[/CODE]

After running that, you can paste into a rich text target without getting rich text from the pasteboard. For more convenient access you could put that into a shell script and place it on your dock (or make an Automator script or AppleScript to run those commands) or something.

(But I typically use a plain text TextEdit window to accomplish the same end.)

Exellent. The Format->Make Plain Text (Shift-Command-T) trick is just what I'm looking for. Strangely, invoking Alt-T and trying to alter the format, didn't work.

Thanks so much.

/rb