How to disable escaping when copy and pasting in IntelliJ?

You can use Ctrl+Alt+Shift+V (presumably ⌘+Alt / Option+Shift+V for OS X) to do Paste Simple (also available from the right-click context menu). This will paste your most recent clipboard content without escaping it.

Many other programs that offer "simple pasting" will use Ctrl+Shift+V instead, but in IntelliJ that opens an IntelliJ clipboard memory dialog, where you can choose previously copied text to paste.

Note that these are all default, but customizable, keyboard shortcuts.

as of December 2019, at least in IntelliJ Ultimate 2019.3, there is a configuration option to disable this annoying behavior: Go to Editor --> Smart Keys --> Javascript and uncheck the "Escape text on paste in string literals" checkbox.

I found the Ctrl + Shift + Alt + V combination a bit cumbersome, and after some digging I found an alternative solution that was more to my liking. I want to share it here in case it is useful to anyone else.

You can actually edit the key mappings for the paste simple command, and replace them with the standard Ctrl + V that most people are familiar with.

Simply go into File -> Settings -> Keymap and enter "paste" into the search box to bring up all the various paste commands. Double click "Paste Simple" and enter Ctrl + V for the shortcut.

You will be warned that the shortcut is currently assigned and you will be given the option to remove it. After doing so, you have pretty much replaced the annoying "enhanced paste" with the standard "simple paste".

Hope that helps someone out there :)