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Comment by wk_end | Hacker News Reader

I disagree on the latter two points:

- The double-click isn't ideal but way less prone to accidentally triggering the slow, painful operation of opening files and programs on ancient floppy disks and CPUs.

- Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life; randomly changing what you've tried to move over and dropping information would be surprising and confusing.

Anyway, "almost all" doesn't mean "all". The number of correct decisions Apple made back then is astonishing and vastly outnumbers the mistakes. Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...)

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> Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life

That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing. Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text.

> Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...)

I used AmigaOS in the late eighties, and found it better than the contemporary Macintosh, though admittedly I don't remember the details well enough to be sure to what extent that was because of the operating system versus the hardware.

I think you're confusing personal preference with universal UX guidelines, especially w.r.t copy-paste.

> That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing.

Most programs which support rich text copy-pasting have "paste with formatting" versus "paste text only" options, with the ability to change the default. If an application doesn't, that's the fault of that developer, not the OS semantics.

> Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text.

I like having source formatting with my pastebins, and most non-technical people do as well. For example, when emailing a code snippet to somebody, I love keeping the syntax highlighting from my editor. And the option to keep the text only is always right there if I need it.

> I think you're confusing personal preference with universal UX guidelines, especially w.r.t copy-paste.

OP started a conversation based on the premise that there are right and wrong ways to design a user interface. If you're going to say it's really just a matter of personal preference, that's fine, but that's not an argument for one side of the original debate, it's a choice to pass up on that debate and have a different conversation altogether.

> Most programs which support rich text copy-pasting have "paste with formatting" versus "paste text only" options, with the ability to change the default.

Does Google Docs have these features? If so, how do you change the default?

> If an application doesn't, that's the fault of that developer, not the OS semantics.

If we accept that argument (which as it happens I don't), it's not an argument in favor of current OS semantics, it's an argument that OS semantics doesn't matter and we shouldn't be debating it in the first place.

Google Docs has the paste without formatting. In the top menu, click Edit > Paste without formatting. You can also use the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+V.

This shortcut is common in many applications I use.

Yes, that can be horrible. But there's Ctrl+Shift+V for plain text pasting.

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