“Ghost cut” can work across apps with reasonable undo support by not using the clipboard at all and some form of IPC instead. For example, when you cut from app B before resolving the cut from app A, app A could be notified to cancel its cut.
I think this is much less intuitive than the current convention though.
...right, thanks. So you could still make it work but you'd definitely need OS support, it's not something one app can fix.
Edit: You could make this work on an app level by checking if the contents of the user's clipboard is still the value they cut. If yes, revert to whatever clipboard contents you saved prior to the cut. Otherwise do nothing.
It's probably too much hidden behavior to be a good idea, but I think it would match what the user wants in 99% of cases.
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.
TFA and comments are clearly a solution is search of the problem.