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Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

ishmael.textualize.io

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Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#81

Post by drdexebtjl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #51
drdexebtjl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be in the clipboard after the undo in that scenario? edit: Yeah, the problem is that the user does not expect undo to do something different depending on what they did on a different program. Undo doing nothing to the clipboard always is more consistent and the better UX.

...yeah. But I still think these problems apply to Ghost Cut too. Unless the idea is that Ghost Cut only works within one app and/or the content lives in a special ghostboard separate from the clipboard, which I think is equally bad UX.

I agree! There’s nothing to fix.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#82

Post by reichstein »

Hyperbolic title is, unsurprisingly, misleading. At least the article follows the style consistently.

The "ghost cut" is a two-step text move. A perfectly fine operation to have, _because_ it's not the same as a cut operation followed by a single paste operation.

Cut can be used without paste, and paste can be used more than once. They're combinable primitive operations. Sometimes what you want isn't that combination. Someones it is. But claiming that they're _broken_ ... is not a sign of someone who's able to see past their own needs and preferences.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#83

Post by AndroTux »

tectec wrote: post #2

I don't think I would like this. He mentions Excel does something similar and Excel is my least favourite app to cut/copy/paste in.

Yeah I feel like Excel always thinks of what would be the worst way to copy/cut/paste depending on my intentions, and then it does exactly that.

I know that’s obviously not the case, but Excel is just so unintuitive in so many ways (for me).

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#84

Post by mrandish »

Don't modern clipboard managers like Ditto already solve this issue because they have non-destructive clipboard history that's instantly viewable and searchable? They also open up the entire feature space because they can have multiple clipboard buffers. Also, it's a user option whether pasting from the history moves the pasted item back to the top or leaves it where it was

Personally, I have a hotkey set up just for pasting the second-to-last thing I cut or copied (Ctrl+Alt+V). This is handy for when I want to swap two things. Ctrl+Alt+(1 thru 0) will paste the last 1 thru 10 history entries.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#85

Post by drdexebtjl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #43
justsomehnguy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it was 2GB of some data? Even if you run low on memory? TFA and comments are clearly a solution is search of the problem.

Is it possible to copy 2GB of data to the clipboard? If it's an image or something I'd expect the clipboard to contain a reference to the image or some such. How do clipboard managers handle this?

Yes. It contains a reference to the image in the source application.

When you paste, X or Wayland lets the source application communicate with the destination application to send the image over.

You’ll likely always have a very simple clipboard manager that stores a single copy of the clipboard so you don’t rely on the source application staying alive.

Clipboard managers are free to store the clipboard anywhere.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#86

Post by PunchyHamster »

>after a cut restores the text to its pre-cut state in the document, but changes to the clipboard remain.

which is exactly how it is supposed to work. why would I want previous state ? Why I'd even remember that state ?

> If you regret replacing your clipboard contents then too bad, they have gone poof in the digital ether.

Clipboard managers have been a thing since clipboards. Tho it would be nice to have one integrated, say so I can get menu of previous pastes with search and paste it in one step instead of "select what's in clipboard, then use it as normal" as it is with most

> The second flaw is that a cut reflows the document. A cut and paste is almost always for the purposes of moving text, and yet the instant I cut, the text reflows and I have to locate the point where I want to paste all over again.

Well unless you're pasting in exact same spot, how else would it work ? Editor doesn't even know if you want to paste it back into same document

> Undoing a paste will remove the newly added text, but it requires a second undo to completely restore the text—assuming there weren't any edits between the cut and paste.

that is because you might've pasted it in wrong space.

Sometimes the simple thing is better, because you can encode its way of working in your way of working without wondering 'oh why my pasted text was copied from'

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#87

Post by recursive »

Cyberdog wrote: post #65
Cockbrand wrote: post #49

The Finder has an interesting take on this: copy a file with ⌘C, then move it somewhere with ⌥⌘V. This is much nicer than the Windows Explorer's CTRL+X and CTRL+V, where the user is unsure what happens when they never paste the file.

What does happen if you never paste the file? It feels to me like cut/copy (in the clipboard manipulation sense)/paste are nonsensical operations on files in the first place.

Nothing.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#88

Post by ethin »

I'm a bit confused about this. As in: how is what cut and paste does right now exactly problematic? And: how does this perform with assistive technologies? Text that is faded out or even invisible visually more often than not is still detectable by assistive technology because it is in the accessibility tree. (This also is what makes certain kinds of websites which try to look "fancy and clean" but in actuality have 6-10 panels all on one page which appear and disappear as you do things extremely hard to use by people with screen readers: the screen reader sees all of the different UI elements, even if completely invisible.) Does this "alteration" remove the "cut" text from the accessibility tree or does it remain? If so, this "fading out" of the region will appear to do absolutely nothing and will confuse disabled users if this feature were to get remade like this.

Re: Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

#90

Post by elwebmaster »

Oh 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.
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