Feedback on the Copy Button Behavior in desktop ChatGPT

ChatGPT Feature requests
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1

Hi OpenAI team,

I noticed that recently the behavior of the “Copy” button under ChatGPT’s responses has changed to copy rich text instead of Markdown, and I wanted to share some feedback on this change.

While rich text can be useful in some contexts, I personally find copying responses as Markdown more flexible and preferable. Markdown provides a clear, consistent format that I can easily manipulate or convert into rich text using my own tools or scripts. This level of control is particularly valuable when pasting content into different applications, where rich text formatting might not always display correctly or as intended.

With Markdown, the formatting is more predictable, and I have the ability to adjust it as needed to ensure that the output appears correctly in different contexts. Rich text, on the other hand, can sometimes introduce issues with inconsistent styling across various applications.

I would like to request an option, or a return to the previous behavior, where clicking the “Copy” button copies the response as Markdown rather than rich text. This would allow users like me to retain the flexibility to handle the formatting as needed.

Thank you for considering this suggestion!

2

Personally, I’ve found being able to copy Rich Text formatting very helpful. So perhaps both options should be possible.

3

Actually I also think rich text is for most of time the wanted thing because most places to paste is not markdown-aware. Those markdown symbols can seem like garbage for non-tech users to manually delete. For me, as a programmer, I write programs to alter the clipboard so that the markdown is transformed to rich text behind the scenes. The real problem is not the rich text. But they seem not to have implemented this copy feature well. Don’t you find that if you click the copy button and paste it into let’s say Apple Notes, the format is OFF, especially with lists?

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1 Like
4

This really needs to be fricking fixed. If we can’t have a search function within the thread, I have to copy the answers to Joplin or Obsidian for my notes so I don’t have to scroll endlessly to the top.

But, they don’t copy markdown! It’s like they want me to stick with Perplexity at this point, lol.