upvote
> 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).

reply
>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!

reply
> 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.

reply
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
reply
> 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?

reply
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.
reply
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?
reply
Have you used a clipboard manager? There are tons that you can configure with notifications and indicators, so you don't have to that.
reply
Having to install yet more software seems worse than the problem you’re suggesting it should solve.
reply
Even windows has this software out of the box because it is so obviously useful
reply
deleted
reply
I feel as though I’m reading the script to a Monty Python sketch.
reply
deleted
reply
Have you never copied, tried to paste and you pasted the wrong thing because copy failed?

Cut + undo, is copy with visual feedback

reply