Jan 2026 · 5 min read · macOS clipboard
Why Bullets Break When You Paste Text on Mac
If you paste text on macOS and your bullet points suddenly collapse, lose indentation, or turn into plain lines, you’re not doing anything wrong.
This happens constantly when copying from browsers, AI tools, Google Docs, Notion, or other rich editors into email, Slack, Teams, or chat apps.
This guide is for macOS.
The words are fine.
The list structure is gone.
The short answer
Bullets are not just characters.
They’re structural objects — and that structure is easy to lose when pasting on macOS.
Once it’s gone, the destination app has nothing to work with.
Key idea
Bullet lists depend on hidden structure, not visible symbols.
When that structure is stripped, apps can only paste plain text — even if it looks like a list before you copy it.
Common bullet paste failures on Mac:
- Bullets paste as plain lines with no indentation
- Numbered lists renumber or collapse
- Nested lists flatten into a single level
- Spacing between list items changes
- Lists turn into dense text blocks
This shows up across email clients, Slack, Teams, Notion, and Docs — especially when copying from browser-based tools.
Why bullets aren’t just text
In rich editors, bullet lists are stored as structured elements:
- List containers
- List items
- Indentation levels
- Spacing rules
When you copy a list, macOS often places multiple representations on the clipboard at once:
- Plain text (just characters)
- Rich text (RTF)
- HTML (with list semantics)
The app you paste into decides which one to use.
Where the structure gets lost
List structure commonly disappears when:
- You paste from a browser into a chat or email app
- You use Paste and Match Style
- The destination app sanitizes rich HTML aggressively
- Nested lists are involved
Once the destination app receives only plain text, it can’t reconstruct the list reliably.
That’s why rebuilding bullets manually “fixes” it — you’re recreating the structure by hand.
Why Paste and Match Style makes this worse
Paste and Match Style intentionally strips formatting so pasted text matches the destination’s appearance.
In doing so, it often discards list semantics entirely.
The result:
- No indentation
- No numbering logic
- No hierarchy
This is expected behavior — not a bug.
When rebuilding bullets is fine
- Short messages
- One-off emails
- Lists with 2–3 items
- Situations where speed doesn’t matter
If this happens occasionally, manual cleanup is reasonable.
When it becomes a workflow problem
- Status updates with bullets
- Daily Slack or Teams messages
- Email drafts with structured lists
- AI-assisted writing used throughout the day
At that point, you’re not fixing a paste — you’re losing time.
The practical fix on Mac
Mac users usually end up choosing between two bad options:
- Keep rich formatting and hope the app behaves
- Strip everything and rebuild lists manually
A clean-paste step is the middle ground: remove hidden styles while keeping simple list structure intact.
If bullet issues are a daily annoyance, a native macOS tool like Purifai solves this before the paste happens.
If this only happens occasionally, you don’t need a tool. If it happens constantly, you do.
Broken bullets aren’t random.
They’re a predictable side effect of how macOS handles the clipboard.
The takeaway
Bullets break on Mac because their structure is fragile.
Paste tools that strip formatting often strip structure too.
If rebuilding lists is part of your daily routine, the fix isn’t another shortcut — it’s a cleaner paste.