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.

This reads to me as the default behavior of "cut" makes certain usability choices that don't gel with the author's personal mental model and workflow, which is of course totally valid. But it is odd to see things described as a "flaw" instead of a choice.

The most glaring example seems to be the first: typically an accidental cut was intended to be a copy, not a delete, so leaving the text in your clipboard is a sensible design. I understand the author's perspective, and maybe OSes should have configurable "cut." But I think most people understand "undo" as "undo change to file" and not "undo change to file + OS state." In that sense the default behavior is not a flaw.

Again - the author's points about an alternative cut are reasonable, but they seem to appeal to a minority of users.

Please don't change expected behaviour!

Excel does, as the author mentions, and it's a massive pain in the arse because it doesn't do what it should.

The "cut" action is supposed to immediately put it into the clipboard, so you can paste that text into other programs if you want to.

Thinking you know better, is really not a reason to break your users' expectations and normal workflow. It's quite possible your idea is a good one, but it's not worth breaking it for the majority, to improve it for a few.

This is what Windows Explorer does when you cut a file, except it does also place it on the clipboard.

>pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert [...] Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point

>What if you want the original semantics of cut? Ghost cut makes that two keys rather than one: copy to clipboard (control-C or command-C) followed by Backspace to remove it from the original document. I so rarely use cut without paste, that this is a clear win for me.

This is just as "broken" as the existing functionality, just in a way that the author prefers. It's a neat idea though, I like it, makes you wonder what would have happened in other apps if cut/paste was never developed as a system-wide, cross-app capability.

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.

It's quite a different mental model the author has from me.

Cut moves text from the application into a separate application, the clipboard.

So just like if I edit in application A, change to application B and hit undo, I do not expect undo to affect A, I also do not expect undo to affect the pasteboard.

The Ghost Cut works a bit closer to how Excel works, which constantly trips me up. In Excel, I might copy a cell, do some edits, then paste, only to learn that nothing was actually copied. In Excel, copy and cut makes a reference to a selection, and if that selection has been undone or changed at the time of paste, there simply isn't anything to paste.

"Ghost cut" is basically how Excel has always done cut&paste, I think maybe without involving the clipboard at all.

Looks like there are two different expectations of cut&paste. Most software seem to treat it as simply a copy&paste with a "delete" action tacked on, while the author (and Excel) treat it as "move content around inside the document".

I get the author and the frustrating undo behavior but I'd also like to add that Ghost Cut is less flexible than the "traditional" cut&paste interpretation: Ghost Cut expects me to always have exactly one location where I want to move the content and expects that this location is in the same program or even in the same document. Traditional cut&paste doesn't have those limitations.

On the other hand, if traditional cut&paste is just glorified copy&paste anyway, I think not much would be lost by replacing it with the Ghost Cut interpretation - people can still get the "traditional" behavior by doing a copy and then pressing backspace...

Cut and paste is broken everywhere because of the number of apps that think they know better and "fix" it.

My bitterness is compounded by being on Linux, where this is probably even more encouraged in GUI apps then in other OSes. But I still have enough independent arguments with web sites, on my phone, and even in the context of the same application at times to have valid complaints just based on those.

Clipboards don't get an independent undo dimension because most users can't handle it. They're pretty full up on dimensions. Clipboard managers at an OS level are the better solution for those who can than another app "fixing" the problem in some unique way.

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.

I sort of see the point about undoing the changes to the clipboard, although it's not actually so simple. The clipboard is system-wide shared state -- what if another application changed the clipboard between the cut and the undo?

The other part of it ("ghosting" the cut) just seems like a matter of taste, and at some point you have to consider whether going against decades of established muscle memory in the users of your software is really worth it.

That said, it is a good idea to re-examine our assumptions every once in a while, so kudos for that.

It always amazes me the things that other people get really amped up about. I've never in my life felt anything at all about cut and paste.

I consider myself reasonably competent, reached conventional milestones in a career in tech, did a thing here and there, and I'm reading this, sort of nodding along, and barely understand what's the issue again with cut&paste, there was one, which one ?, anyway, middle age you guys, it's real.

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.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with this. The big problem I've had with cut/copy/paste has been with Windows and software inspired by it, which is that copying without selecting any text blows away the clipboard (because you've chosen to cut or copy the empty string).

Like yes, I get that in a strict engineering sense, that is the correct and least surprising behavior. But it's stupid and virtually guaranteed to not be what I wanted to happen. My expectation is what macOS does in this event -- nothing.

>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'

"Ghost cut" _does_ exist in VSCode, Word, GDocs, etc., it's called a move and you do it by dragging selected text with your mouse.

This person is free to think this, but I don't think I agree.

Personally I'd prefer something to be done about cut/copy-jacking where you try to copy a highlighted item and your site or application decides to copy something entirely different in an effort to be 'helpful'.

If I'm copying a url, I don't want my browser prefixing it with https:// for example.

want to thank the author of that post for giving me the opportunity to be thankful that I get to live my life without ever having to deal with the consequences of their opinions.

imagine having that guy as your roommate!

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.

Plain text is way harder than people think. Partly because the reflow rules change depending if you are making edits in front of or behind the cursor/point of action.

On anything structured that doesn't require re-flow this approach makes some sense.

Lists, Grids, etc, there are pro/cons but it makes sense.

In this case you ARE causing reflow, so content and format change at the same time.

With normal cut and paste the reflow happens at the point of attention, and the final state paste keeps your eye right at the point of action.

This jumping around stuff means you are doubley losing tracking if you paste below the cut point. This is effectively an out of bound focus shift. This has higher cognitive penalty because layout is no longer occurring in serial but in parallel in multiple places.

idempotence, types, rejection of global state, all of these "engineering" rules go out the window when you enter the realm of mereological nihilism that is text editing.

The best you can do it think of things as causal chains like some CRDTs do.

At first I thought this was going to be the widely reported problem where despite copying something many times it still won't be there in the clipboard. I've even developed a habit of CTRL+C-ing half a dozen times from Chrome just to ensure it really worked.

It's called cut and paste (2 actions), not "move" or otherwise. Being consistent with decades of software usage is more important that whatever you think is "broken" or not, because that's not actually the case, just another model of how to do things. The Excel example is particularly interesting, Excel does something similar, so when you "cut" ("ghost" version) and paste in a cell that overlaps with the range being cut, it breaks completely, which it wouldn't if it did the simple "remove cells, put them somewhere in memory, paste them to new location".

What 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. Instead, I have to paste to an open editor in a terminal window and then do another copy and paste to the destination to most reliably disable this.

> anything more than you are doing already. I call it "Ghost Cut", and it works like this: pressing ctrl+x fades the selected text and makes it inert—you can't click on the cut text and the cursor just kind of leaps over it, but it is still present in the document. Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point and there is nothing to undo. If you decide you don't want to paste then hitting escape will restore the text to its active editable state.

What if you press Ctrl+X twice on separate regions and then press Escape (once)? Does it restore the state after the first Ctrl+X? So Ctrl+X pushes on a to-be-cut stack and Escape pops? Probably not.

Anyway, this looks like it means that the inability to undo the change in clipboard state is replaced by the inability to return to an earlier to-be-cut state. Or maybe the editor includes a Vim-like time-travel history that includes the to-be-cut state?

Regarding the clipboard state, given that the clipboard is an OS-level object, for me it makes sense that an application-level or document-level undo doesn’t undo changes in the OS object. Similarly, undo after Save doesn’t undo the change in the file system state. Of course, it’s fine to provide alternative editing operations in addition.

I 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 mostly my own fault.

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).

Have to disagree here. I think Excel is amazingly well engineered, and very well designed for the majority of the users, despite some flaws.

Excel is a bit complicated for cut/copy/paste, because you have not only the content of the cells, but also references to cells. Cut and copy have subtly different behaviour that, I think, works well for most people's mental model.

Namely: Most instances of cut are followed by one paste, and really constitute an atomic move. That's why when you cut and paste something in Excel elsewhere, all references to cells that have been moved are updated, no matter whether they were inside the moved area or outside, and no matter whether they were relative or absolute. (Just the same as they're naturally updated if you insert or delete columns/rows above or to the left of the referenced cell).

That's why a cut "marks" the cut cells, and after you paste, nothing is marked anymore. You can't paste twice. It's akin to the Ghost Cut described in the article: an atomic move that only happens upon paste.

When you copy, however, and paste somewhere else, a) only the "relative" references among the moved cells are updated (neither absolute references nor references in cells that were not copied are updated); and b) the copied area remains "marked" and you can paste again and again.

Given the complexity of this (think about references that are ranges...), a) it's a wonder that it works as well as it does, doing the expected thing for most people most of the time, and b) it's understandable that you can't cut or copy, then modify the marked origin (it'll unmark the cells and abort the operation), then paste.

This means, incidentally, that a copy & delete in Excel is distinct from a cut.

My Excel cut-and-paste workflow is:

* Copy the text

* Paste the text

* Go back and delete the copied text

because regular cut and paste breaks all the formulas that reference where I'm pasting into. They should have kept normal cut-and-paste and made Ctrl+Shift+(plus) do their special paste.

Half of the time it doesn't work as well.