Show HN: Exro – I got tired of cleaning up copy/paste between apps

Exro is a new tool that strips unwanted formatting from pasted text across apps. The creator, posting on Hacker News, built it to solve a recurring friction: copying content from Slack, Claude, GPT, or Gmail and having to manually fix timestamps, editing markers, API field formatting, and stray highlighting.

The tool scans pasted text and applies deterministic cleanup rules without changing the actual copy or grammar. The developer noted that attempts to solve this with AI prompts were inconsistent — formatting rules didn't apply reliably across different contexts. Exro takes a rules-based approach instead, applying the same transformations every time. Users can paste directly in the tool to see results.

The problem Exro targets is common friction in knowledge work. Developers and professionals regularly move content between communication platforms (Slack), writing tools (Claude), AI assistants (GPT), and email, each with its own formatting conventions. Slack adds timestamps and "(edited)" markers. Some platforms inject HTML or markdown that needs sanitizing. API documentation or code snippets copied from chat lose their formatting or gain unwanted characters. The fix typically means manual cleanup — removing Slack metadata, converting inline code back to readable format, deleting errant highlighting — tasks that consume time across dozens of paste operations per day.

Rule-based text transformation tools occupy a small niche in the productivity layer. Most existing solutions rely either on manual find-and-replace or on AI to infer intent, both of which have trade-offs. Exro's deterministic model avoids the inconsistency of LLM-based approaches, which the creator experienced firsthand with prompt engineering, but it also means the tool is limited to predefined rules rather than adaptive to novel formatting problems. The tool's value depends on how well it covers common pain points in the workflows of its intended users.