I’ve used a lot of text editors over the years. From code editors to writing apps, on desktop and mobile, and everywhere in between. 

When you move text from one app to another, you run into issues of styles moving around.

This reminds me of the days with Microsoft Word, where I couldn’t understand why my essay had different font sizes and spacing. And don’t even get me started on trying to shift around an image inside the text. Nightmares. 

I still see style issues today.

Someone shares a Google Doc, and the text switches halfway down the page. I read a printed-out bulletin, and there’s a noticeable font difference where it’s clear text was just pasted in. 

Just about everyone knows about Copy and Paste on a computer. Although once in a while, I run across someone who isn’t familiar with the shortcut. In that moment, I excitedly tell them, instead of chiding them. 

But what most people don’t know is that you can copy and paste text with or without matching style. Go to the edit menu of any app on the Mac (and if memory serves you, you can do something similar on Windows), and you’ll see Paste and Paste and Match Style. 

Paste and Match Style is magical. In most instances, that’s what I want, and arguably it should be the default. What it does is take your text and match it to whatever the style of text is in the document that you’re pasting into. I love it and use it all the time. I’ve even learned the shortcut for it. 

The problem, though, arises when I’m testing out different apps for writing. Every app is a little different. I might write in Ulysses, TextEdit (with Plain Text mode turned on by default), or Apple Notes. 

When I’m writing in these different apps and pasting around, I find that with or without matching style, my text gets screwed up. Sometimes it loses all paragraphs and dumps the sentences together in one glob, and sometimes it removes hyperlinks (which are such a joy to use when writing). 

Now, with the introduction of Apple Intelligence, I’m running into a problem.

I also have a long history with spell checkers, and in general despise them. They’re useful, but not useful enough. When I paid for ProWritingAid, I loved its smart checker. It suggested real grammatical things and helped me improve as a writer. So I’d often take the time to paste text in, use its checker, and then pull the text back out. 

That’s great when you’re writing a book, but tedious when you’re trying to ship a quick blog post.

So I’m struggling with what to do for checking my writing.

Enter Apple Intelligence.

It’s fantastic. It has a beautiful UI that will scan across all your text, suggest improvements in a different color font, and at the press of a button, you can accept all the changes. I’ve tried it a half dozen times now and found that every change it suggests is a good one. Unlike Spell Checker on Word, or even the smart checker on ProWritingAid, it has a 100% hit rate of suggestions I love.

That’s amazing, and makes it so valuable that I really want to use it.

But I’m running into an issue. 

On MarsEdit, I can’t trigger Apple Intelligence. I’ve tried, but there must be some issue or bug that’s blocking it. I wish I could force Apple Intelligence (that’s a long word to type out, wondering if I should shorten it, but refusing to accept the obvious initialism) to open with a keyboard shortcut, but alas, no luck on that front.

So I find myself copying the text I’ve written in MarsEdit out to another app, checking it with Apple Intelligence, then pasting it back into MarsEdit, and finally fixing the paragraphs and hyperlinks.

That’s so annoying.

But I can’t find any way around it. If anyone has a solution, I’d love to know. In the meantime, you’ll see some posts have gotten corrected and fixed, and others rushed out with errors.