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How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

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Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#91

Post by Szpadel »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #64
phkahler wrote: post #16

"Undo copy" seems like it should not even exist. Delete does the same. Seems like the result of trying to hard to "improve" the UI.

It makes sense if you accidentally paste somewhere to immediately be able to undo. But, just like in a text editor, undo should undo the most recent change. Once a copied file has edits, the copy operation isn't most recent, so that's not what should be undone. Of course, file explorer would need to be aware of changes to files it hadn't made for this to work.

i guess simple check for file size and last modification would do the job

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#92

Post by motrm »

taneq wrote: post #36

You know what's even more awesome? Select the desktop and press Ctrl+Z. The last thing you did in Explorer gets undone. Even if it was copying a 100GB file from a network share drive onto your local hard drive. Even if that was weeks ago. It's fantastic.

I was going to post this exact issue.

It's been a thing as far back as I can remember.

The worst part is when you don't remember what the last thing you moved was. You know you've undone something, but you don't know what it is.

Is something going to be broken now?

Are you going to lose something that's now in a place where you weren't expecting it to be any more?

Good luck figuring it out!

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#93

Post by Joe_Boogz »

hilbert42 wrote: post #32

You'd think that with Windows having an install size of some 7GB that Microsoft would still have room for a tiny amount of code that would prevent this stupid behavior from happening. For decades, there have been other stupid annoyances with Windows Explorer such not providing options in 'Copy' to allow the automatic renaming of files in cases where the destination contains files of the same name. It stands to reason…

I think you’re underestimating how difficult it is to communicate cross team at a corporation as large as Microsoft.

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#94

Post by pawelduda »

PhilipRoman wrote: post #74
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is a law unto itself. The 'feature' that irritates me the most is how a cell copy is forgotten unless you paste immediately. Bear in mind that this is an application so iconoclastic that it had its own C compiler.

One program that does copying right IMO is tmux, it keeps a list of recently copied things, which you can view by pressing Ctrl-B = and choose which clipboard to paste. Very useful when you need to copy multiple separate strings without going back and forth between windows. I've caught myself doing optimistic copying - if I see something that i might need to paste in the future, like git commit hashes, file names, et…

This is my must have extension. Gnome has one and there's an app for that on MacOS. Multiple clipboard entries are such a trivial but useful change that I can't go back to the old way anymore

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#95

Post by greggsy »

strictfp wrote: post #29
o1y32 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ran into this issue and looked it up. It was an intentional design choice, and kind of makes sense when you realize that Excel sheets can have reference of each other -- they are not necessarily independent. Of course a lot of people probably never do that in their entire lifetime when using Excel and can feel annoying.

They could solve that by keeping track of references and asking you though.

As a daily Excel power user, I'd prefer to just know that there is one expected behaviour, and not to be bothered by a context window. The fact that ctrl-z just changes context to the other workbook is enough notification in itself, and I can just ctrl-y otherwise.

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#97

Post by solarkraft »

greggsy wrote: post #95
strictfp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could solve that by keeping track of references and asking you though.

As a daily Excel power user, I'd prefer to just know that there is one expected behaviour, and not to be bothered by a context window. The fact that ctrl-z just changes context to the other workbook is enough notification in itself, and I can just ctrl-y otherwise.

Wouldn't it be a good compromise to ask you on the first occurrence?

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#99

Post by kmoser »

This looks like the Windows 11 interface. Thankfully Windows 10 doesn't seem to have that problem. However, Windows 11 has another glaring problem: the context menu includes a trash can icon (not labeled! Although I believe it does have a tooltip if you hover and wait) which, when clicked, deletes the right-clicked item. If you were attempting to open the trash can to look for a deleted file, you just deleted another file.

Re: How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows

#100

Post by johnwalkr »

lelandfe wrote: post #6
spuz wrote: post #2

How unfortunate. Windows should disable the Undo option as soon as the copied file is modified.

Can confirm this is how macOS does it. They remove the file from the stack of Undo actions after it's been modified post-copy.

MacOS also doesn’t let you cut a file and then lose it by accidentally copying something else to the clipboard, because to “cut and paste” you copy, then use option-command-v to move the file instead of copying.

I think this mistake is usually recoverable in Windows, but

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