I think this is a reasonable set of objections to how cut and paste works if you were designing it from scratch. I'm not saying I agree with the conclusions, cut AND paste, is 2 operations so it seems silly to say you can undo both with 1 undo. It's kind of a RISC/CISC thing, is your opcode CUTANDPASTE or CUT and PASTE?
Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
131–140 of 162 posts
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#132Is there any kind of solution to saving everything that is cut or copied to some kind of temporary history so you can paste things you copied/cut like an hour ago?
That's called a clipboard manager and there are many of them.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#133I think I have permanently broken my mental model of the clipboard. I’m always alternating between Linux, Mac and Windows and muscle memory invariably causes me to do the wrong key combo for the OS/app I’m using. Throw in clipboard sync/history tools etc which aren’t always reliable, I regularly paste and either nothing happens or it’s a previous copy of something. It sounds like a small thing but it’s maddening and…
It always annoys me when on Windows (often accidentally) selecting something replaces what I explicitly Ctr+C'd because there are no separate clipboards.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#134I'd be happy if things stopped interfering with standard X11 select/paste. It's now a random crap shoot if I have to hold Shift or not to regain that elegance.
And, the whole idea of copy/paste having to use both mouse AND keyboard (select Ctrl-c click Ctrl-v) is barbaric. X11 got it right and it seems all "modern" apps are trying really hard to introduce barbarisms.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#135What I'd like seen addressed is the insistence of every app trying it's best to include formatting information, even so far as to include table cells formatting data in the clipboard. I've found copying this format info useful maybe twice(?) in my 50+ year life and otherwise it is a huge PITA. Including having email clients crash or refuse to properly undo weird table formats that unintentionally get pasted over. Ins…
Table cells or even highlighted bits in a larger copy are often enough useful but they should at the very least strip the styling that applies to the whole text because in 99.99% of cases I want that to match where I'm pasting to.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#136Oh if only cut and paste was broken... In Windows and Linux copy and paste itself is broken. Sometimes you copy with mouse, sometimes you copy with keyboard, and if it is a recent version of MS Office likely neither will work. Sometimes you paste with Ctrl+v sometimes with Ctrl+shift+v, sometimes with mouse, sometimes it just won't work. Such a simple operation should have been completely owned by the OS.
It works very reasonable on Linux/X11 with two separate clipboards - one for Ctrl+C/V and one for selection / middle click paste.
Ctrl+Shift+C/V is only necessary for terminals that already have other historical pre-GUI conventions for the Ctrl+ combinations - and you can always use a terminal emulator that lets you use Ctrl+C/V with the GUI semantics.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#137Excel did this and it was pretty confusing.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#138Cut and Paste is three operations. Cut is two operations copy and delete, copy is never undone by undo it should not be undone when you cut either. I cut, undo, ..., undo, and paste multiple times a day. It's a feature not a bug. > Cut & Paste is not atomic Yes because it's two different actions. What does "Ghost Cut" do if you paste multiple times? Paste the cut text first and then what? The previous thing in your c…
I agree with TFA on all points and therefore strongly disagree with all that is said in this post. "Cut'n paste" should be one atomic operation. If you want to do multiple pastes (why? what's the context?) then copy to the clipboard and paste to your heart's content. It's also a fundamental flaw that undoing cut doesn't undo its side effects. Undo should always mean: restore the state of the world (/of the system) to…
> If you want to do multiple pastes (why? what's the context?)
Remove a piece of data from one place and place it in multiple others.
While I empathise with the desire for an atomic operation for moving text, the cut semantics have solidified to the current experience for many years. Additionally no undo or redo operation in text editors ever modifies the clipboard, if I copy and undo the clipboard will keep the copied text. Similarly if I cut undo copy another piece of text and then redo, the clipboard will maintain the text copied, before the redo not the cut text.
Undo and redo on the clipboard is a very foreign idea to how text editing has been done by billions of people over decades.
An atomic move operation would be nice, but it needs to not change the semantics of existing operations, and implementation wise does not need to involve the clipboard at all.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copy and paste gives you visual feedback without reflowing the document. I also use it to intentionally add a marker in undo history in documents in not planning to change, as that way I can use the undo history to jump to different areas.
Where does Copy give you feedback that you actually copied something?
In Linux, if under XFCE, strangely by default, Clipman keeps a log of all text ever copied, in a giant textsrc file ( .cache/xfce4/clipman/textsrc )
That is kind of the opposite though, and more of a passive, almost furtive, indelible clipboard feedback. I was pretty astonished to find it, hovering somewhere near 4MB with years of content.
Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere
#140I guess they've never heard of select-and-drag? Which isn't universal, but is common. And should be universal. I use it frequently. So many one-time-password forms break it in various ways, like wanting the value to go into six separate input boxes (why is this so common!?).