[Annoyances] X-Windows Copy & Paste

[Seth Nickell]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 11:29AM -0800, Marko Macek wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Mike Hearn wrote:
>
>> The main problems with the clipboard IMHO are:
> [...]
>> - It doesn't persist *anywhere*, meaning that if you cut something to
>> the clipboard intending to paste it later and you have a power cut, 
>> it's
>> gone.
>
> Well, for files windows does something different, it just marks the 
> file as "about to be deleted" and doesn't do anything with it until 
> it's pasted somewhere else.
>
> It might be interesting to do this consistently everywhere, even for 
> text... There's always "delete" for actual deletion.

This behavior breaks the conceptual model of cut and paste. Rather than 
having the clipboard be a location, it now is an abstract list of things 
that can be pasted but haven't actually gone anywhere yet. This is a 
less tangible model. The way cut and paste works with files is klugey 
and is not a good pattern to follow.

While I would have no problems with a system that made the clipboard 
persistent (arguably this is what ms should have done w/ the clipboard 
except that the ms clipboard isn't a stack but stores one item), showing 
shadows of "cut items" isn't so hot.

-Seth