Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

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.

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.

>hitting escape will restore the text to its active editable state

This is the fatal flow of the whole thing, with this it stops being a drop-in replacement.

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.

> 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.

Star didn't have cut/copy/paste. Instead it had ‘copy to’ and ‘move to’ operations on the current selection, more like today's drag-and-drop. Some influential people decided that invisible fragile clipboard state was better than a copy/move-in-progress state.

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.

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.

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.

I really like this, but I think I'd be confused if I saw this without context -- the current behavior is so ingrained in me that any deviation would kind of be a wtf. Not unrecoverable but I think it's hard to change something so widespread.

This is an interesting perspective I had never really thought about, and I like the proposed new action, but I don't really want it in lieu of how cut/paste currently works.

In my mental model (which is also how OSs work, though not necessarily how things ought work), the clipboard exists at the OS level, and undo/redo act on the application level. I don't find it to be unexpected or undesirable that doing Ctrl+X,V,Z,Z results in the application returning to its original state but the clipboard ending up being modified.

All that said, I appreciate that this interrogated my mental model a bit.

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.

The Finder has an interesting take on this: copy a file with ⌘C, then move it somewhere with ⌥⌘V. This is much nicer than the Windows Explorer's CTRL+X and CTRL+V, where the user is unsure what happens when they never paste the file.

Most of the time I use "cmd + x" to delete the whole line during coding. So ghost cut conflicts with my habit. I don't think it is a good habit but it is what I got used to. I've also seen people with the same habit. So it might be a good time to change my habit

Cut and paste is a UI failure; it only works kinda if you have fully functional hands. If your hands don't work right, or you have tremors or other mobility impairments, your chances of succeeding with cut and paste drop off significantly.

The Emacs mark-and-point UI works for everyone: fully functional hands, partially functioning hands, or even speech recognition. It also solves the problem of copy, cut, and paste described in the article.

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!

This reminds me of File Explorer's cut behavior. It's a nice idea but the layout shift on paste is disorienting.

first, _DONT_ overwrite standard behavior as default; opencode is doing this. When I get in the flow, it all breaks when I want to copy something and it claims it's copying, but no, it's in putty or whatever and it's just a damn line.

issue here: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/13984

ALWAYS default to regular behavior unless it's something you know exactly is going to go correctly.

Seems complicated. Doesn't selecting, then drag-and-drop do what the author wants?

Agree accidentally clobbering the clipboard is super annoying. Clipboard history apps are a godsend. Like Paste on Mac, or Windows has it built in.

Interesting take on such a simple action but such a frustrating one when it does not work they way you want.

Every implementation is the same, and no spec exists, so how is it broken?

Hmm, now I'm wondering if paste should save the clipboard contents before so undo can restore them.

But no. Your text editor is a cottage surrounded by an outdoors it doesn't control. It makes no more sense to try to take charge of the clipboard than of a flock of geese flying overhead. What if someone or some other app pasted something in between? Paste is an arrow shot, a message in a bottle.

> 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.

It's true that cut and paste reflows text twice (once on cut and once on paste), but it does so in the place where your eyes are already looking. Ghost cut reflows only once (on paste), but it does so in a place where I'm not already looking. I find this much more confusing based on the video.

> Cut & Paste is not atomic

Neither is ghost cut, because if you only cut you're left with grey text as an intermediate state.

> Cut is undoable

...this is the part I agree with, and it seems trivially fixable. If you undo a `cut`, put back whatever was on the clipboard beforehand.

I think it would be confusing if only one app did it, but if an OS decided to implement this system wide, I think it would be a good improvement.

You could also make `copy` possible to undo, but I think that would be weirder since there's no visible effect of your undo action.

Copy and cut are just redundant steps anyway. In Linux (generally), you can simply middle click to copy the current selection. Maybe we could add shift+middle click (or something) to do a move instead of copy.

The deeper underlying problem is that we treat arbitrary UI/UX implementations as objective truth. There is one decided way your computer can be interacted with, and you the user must accommodate it. This is what I want to change.

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.

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.

AFAIK, Chuck always used cut, undo, paste. I think he referred to copy & paste as being for script kiddies.

/s