Paste It 3.6

Paste It is a browser extension I started work on in 2010 ago as lightweight alternative to my note keeping extension Papercuts, with the primary aim of being able to paste a single line of text - typically the user's email address - in the quickest and simplest way possible.

Over the past decade Paste It has found over 10,000 users on Chrome worldwide. This week I released Paste It 3.6, which brings a number of new features and improved support for Edge.

Friendlier Permissions

If you installed Paste It prior to this week, you may have seen a message that the extension could “read and change all your data on the websites you visit”. While this may have sounded a little scary, it was required so that the extension could add the neccessary code to each website to support keyboard shortcuts i.e. pasting text when the "Alt+V" key was held down.

With version 3.6, I've rewritten how the extension interprets keyboard commands using Chromium's in-built commands API. As this is a standard and safe method supported by Chromium, there won't be any warnings when you first install Paste It.

Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts

Paste It 3.6 also brings a commonly requested new feature - customizable keyboard shortcuts! If you don't want Alt+V to be the keyboard command, just open chrome://extensions/shortcuts to change it to anything you like. This could be useful if you have another app that's using the default command already.

I'm hoping to bring this update to Paste It's bigger brother Papercuts, though that will take a bit more work due to the more complicated nature of the extension supporting multiple keyboard shortcuts.

Other Tweaks

There are a few other tweaks in this version, such as a cleaner Options page with clearer usage instructions. I've improved feedback for some unsupported pages such as the Chrome Web Store or internal browser pages - if you try and use Paste It on these websites you will now get an alert instead of a silent failure.

Some sites such as Gmail will still fail silently - this is due to the complicated nature of their rich text input which has proven difficult to work around.

Improved Edge Support

While it was already possible to install Paste It on the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, version 3.6 makes a few changes to the terminology used inside Edge to provide a more optimal experience.

Today I'm also pleased to announce that Paste It is now available in the Edge Add-ons section of the Microsoft Store. It works exactly the same as the Chrome Web Store version, but if you are using Edge I'd recommend installing via Microsoft's store to ensure future updates are downloaded automatically.

Paste It and Papercuts are both offered 100% free with no ads or paywalled features. Please show your support by leaving a review in the Chrome Web Store, Edge Add-ons store or sharing them with your friends.