Comment by throwawayffffas
10 hours ago
Cut 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 clipboard? Why does my editor need to read my clipboard if I am not pasting (to implement the rollback)? What if there was a secret key in there do we just hand it to copilot or whatever extension is running?
Cut is copy and delete plain and simple.
Cut and paste is a poor analogy in the file explorer, what the file explorer does is a move, "cutting" fills the first parameter and "pasting" fills the second. Hence the greying out and not doing anything until you paste. There is no clipboard for the filesystem. Also in the file browser it's extremely unlikely you would want to paste into multiple places, something not true in text editors.
EDIT:
Now listen I am not saying the proposed semantics are bad, to each their own, but it's a different operation all together the clipboard is not even required you could have a separate short cut that grays out the text and then moves it to where you want. The whole thing would be atomic called a move and be cleaner in all ways.
> Cut and paste is a poor analogy in the file explorer, what the file explorer does is a move, "cutting" fills the first parameter and "pasting" fills the second. Hence the greying out and not doing anything until you paste. There is no clipboard for the filesystem. Also in the file browser it's extremely unlikely you would want to paste into multiple places, something not true in text editors.
Yep, which is why the dislike for macOS's finder workflow of copy a file: ⌘+C (irrespective of cut/move/copy) -> decide at destination: ⌘+⌥+V (move) or ⌘+V (paste) confuses me. It's the best intuition imo.
Weirdly, Windows does the same thing which doesn't garner enough hate as it also excludes the associated good UX. Cut fades a file out in the explorer (akin to this "Ghost cut" concept) then a paste moves it (so you don't end up losing files).
I dunno, in my preferred text editor (joe), i set up a selection, and I can delete it if I want, or go where I want it and do copy or move the selected region.
>paste multiple times
Because you're trying to 'copy' it?
This feels baby-duck-y. No given mental model is more right than another. There's already not even a consistent model, because:
>Cut is copy and delete
So copy and delete! Or, in Vim and Emacs, just delete!
> Or, in Vim and Emacs, just delete!
Off topic, but that’s actually my biggest pet peeve vim. You copy text one place to overwrite some other text, you delete the existing text and they you go to paste and… the buffer has been overwritten. It makes so much more sense to require users to hit the obvious, composable ‘yd’ in the cases they want to copy than an arcane incantation in the cases they want to overwrite text.
Spending enough time drinking the kool aid means I know at least 3 ways to use registers to avoid that, and practically end up using none of them
> I cut, undo, ..., undo, and paste multiple times a day.
Why would you cut + undo as opposed to just copy? Are they not the same operation at that point?
I often cut + undo because seeing the cut is feedback which tells me the operation successfully put the content into clipboard. This is not always a guarantee especially in web apps, and sometimes I just have focus on the wrong window.
Have you used a clipboard manager? There are tons that you can configure with notifications and indicators, so you don't have to that.
4 replies →
How can you be sure that the undo stack is in sync with the clipboard? Wouldn't cut+paste be a more reliable pseudo-copy than cut+undo?
I feel as though I’m reading the script to a Monty Python sketch.
Have you never copied, tried to paste and you pasted the wrong thing because copy failed?
Cut + undo, is copy with visual feedback