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.

Please don't change expected behaviour!

Excel does, as the author mentions, and it's a massive pain in the arse because it doesn't do what it should.

The "cut" action is supposed to immediately put it into the clipboard, so you can paste that text into other programs if you want to.

Thinking you know better, is really not a reason to break your users' expectations and normal workflow. It's quite possible your idea is a good one, but it's not worth breaking it for the majority, to improve it for a few.

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.

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.

It's quite a different mental model the author has from me.

Cut moves text from the application into a separate application, the clipboard.

So just like if I edit in application A, change to application B and hit undo, I do not expect undo to affect A, I also do not expect undo to affect the pasteboard.

The Ghost Cut works a bit closer to how Excel works, which constantly trips me up. In Excel, I might copy a cell, do some edits, then paste, only to learn that nothing was actually copied. In Excel, copy and cut makes a reference to a selection, and if that selection has been undone or changed at the time of paste, there simply isn't anything to paste.

"Ghost cut" is basically how Excel has always done cut&paste, I think maybe without involving the clipboard at all.

Looks like there are two different expectations of cut&paste. Most software seem to treat it as simply a copy&paste with a "delete" action tacked on, while the author (and Excel) treat it as "move content around inside the document".

I get the author and the frustrating undo behavior but I'd also like to add that Ghost Cut is less flexible than the "traditional" cut&paste interpretation: Ghost Cut expects me to always have exactly one location where I want to move the content and expects that this location is in the same program or even in the same document. Traditional cut&paste doesn't have those limitations.

On the other hand, if traditional cut&paste is just glorified copy&paste anyway, I think not much would be lost by replacing it with the Ghost Cut interpretation - people can still get the "traditional" behavior by doing a copy and then pressing backspace...

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.

Hyperbolic title is, unsurprisingly, misleading. At least the article follows the style consistently.

The "ghost cut" is a two-step text move. A perfectly fine operation to have, _because_ it's not the same as a cut operation followed by a single paste operation.

Cut can be used without paste, and paste can be used more than once. They're combinable primitive operations. Sometimes what you want isn't that combination. Someones it is. But claiming that they're _broken_ ... is not a sign of someone who's able to see past their own needs and preferences.

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.

It always amazes me the things that other people get really amped up about. I've never in my life felt anything at all about cut and paste.

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.

Don't modern clipboard managers like Ditto already solve this issue because they have non-destructive clipboard history that's instantly viewable and searchable? They also open up the entire feature space because they can have multiple clipboard buffers. Also, it's a user option whether pasting from the history moves the pasted item back to the top or leaves it where it was

Personally, I have a hotkey set up just for pasting the second-to-last thing I cut or copied (Ctrl+Alt+V). This is handy for when I want to swap two things. Ctrl+Alt+(1 thru 0) will paste the last 1 thru 10 history entries.

I don't think I've ever had a problem with this. The big problem I've had with cut/copy/paste has been with Windows and software inspired by it, which is that copying without selecting any text blows away the clipboard (because you've chosen to cut or copy the empty string).

Like yes, I get that in a strict engineering sense, that is the correct and least surprising behavior. But it's stupid and virtually guaranteed to not be what I wanted to happen. My expectation is what macOS does in this event -- nothing.

>after a cut restores the text to its pre-cut state in the document, but changes to the clipboard remain.

which is exactly how it is supposed to work. why would I want previous state ? Why I'd even remember that state ?

> If you regret replacing your clipboard contents then too bad, they have gone poof in the digital ether.

Clipboard managers have been a thing since clipboards. Tho it would be nice to have one integrated, say so I can get menu of previous pastes with search and paste it in one step instead of "select what's in clipboard, then use it as normal" as it is with most

> 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.

Well unless you're pasting in exact same spot, how else would it work ? Editor doesn't even know if you want to paste it back into same document

> Undoing a paste will remove the newly added text, but it requires a second undo to completely restore the text—assuming there weren't any edits between the cut and paste.

that is because you might've pasted it in wrong space.

Sometimes the simple thing is better, because you can encode its way of working in your way of working without wondering 'oh why my pasted text was copied from'

"Ghost cut" _does_ exist in VSCode, Word, GDocs, etc., it's called a move and you do it by dragging selected text with your mouse.

This person is free to think this, but I don't think I agree.

Personally I'd prefer something to be done about cut/copy-jacking where you try to copy a highlighted item and your site or application decides to copy something entirely different in an effort to be 'helpful'.

If I'm copying a url, I don't want my browser prefixing it with https:// for example.

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!

I'm a bit confused about this. As in: how is what cut and paste does right now exactly problematic? And: how does this perform with assistive technologies? Text that is faded out or even invisible visually more often than not is still detectable by assistive technology because it is in the accessibility tree. (This also is what makes certain kinds of websites which try to look "fancy and clean" but in actuality have 6-10 panels all on one page which appear and disappear as you do things extremely hard to use by people with screen readers: the screen reader sees all of the different UI elements, even if completely invisible.) Does this "alteration" remove the "cut" text from the accessibility tree or does it remain? If so, this "fading out" of the region will appear to do absolutely nothing and will confuse disabled users if this feature were to get remade like this.

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.

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.

It's called cut and paste (2 actions), not "move" or otherwise. Being consistent with decades of software usage is more important that whatever you think is "broken" or not, because that's not actually the case, just another model of how to do things. The Excel example is particularly interesting, Excel does something similar, so when you "cut" ("ghost" version) and paste in a cell that overlaps with the range being cut, it breaks completely, which it wouldn't if it did the simple "remove cells, put them somewhere in memory, paste them to new location".

What I'd like seen addressed is the insistence of every app trying it's best to include formatting information, even so far as to include table cells formatting data in the clipboard. I've found copying this format info useful maybe twice(?) in my 50+ year life and otherwise it is a huge PITA. Including having email clients crash or refuse to properly undo weird table formats that unintentionally get pasted over. Instead, I have to paste to an open editor in a terminal window and then do another copy and paste to the destination to most reliably disable this.

> 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.

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.

> If you decide you don't want to paste then hitting escape will restore the text to its active editable state.

That's unergonomic, you should move your whole hang of your regular positioning because you can't use the convenient Ctrl+Z?

This also breaks cut and paste across apps because now you have different mechanics depending on context.

Might be better to preserve everything, but maybe have an option to visually preserve the text until time has passed or other action? (Paste, typing, etc)

1. That's the issue with clipboard management. Given the transient nature of clipboard, while I do appreciate having the opportunity to preserve the pre-cut values, it's not that often that I need it, so I'd definitely not pollute my app actions undo stack with an extra step (yes, the author doesn't do that either) And you can improve your app by storing the pre-cut clipboard and allowing easy restore

> This is not without precedent.

It has an obvious precedent in using cut and paste for moving files in a GUI file manager. When you cut a file, it doesn't disappear, but may be marked somehow (e.g. grayed out) as being the source of a move; it disappears from its original location when the move is completed.

Ignoring whether this is a good idea:

- can this be made to work cross-application? You would have to be able to detect that a paste happened somewhere

- you can’t know whether a user wants to paste the same text twice. How do you handle that in the UI?

- how do you handle the case where, after copying, the user changes their mind, and never pastes the text?

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.

Ghost cut looks like a good idea to deal with an issue OP has :

- I located where I want my text to go

- but when I select and cut, it reflows and I need to locate the place again

Considering the millions of edge cases with Copy, Cut & Paste, the best idea seems to use two other keys for Ghost Cut and Ghost Paste. And Ghost Paste would put it into the clipboard so that you can paste it multiple times and in other apps.

I've another idea of how to do the Ghost thing :

- locate where the text has to go, mark the location

- select and cut the text, the editor reflows

- go back to the marked location then paste

the editor may have built-in bookmark key shortcuts, or it would be a new thing to create.

If I "Ghost Cut" from one application and paste into another, what is pasted? the last thing that was in my clipboard or the ghost cut text? And if I undo in the second application, is the text restored in the first one?

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.

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.

I'd be happy if things stopped interfering with standard X11 select/paste. It's now a random crap shoot if I have to hold Shift or not to regain that elegance.

And, the whole idea of copy/paste having to use both mouse AND keyboard (select Ctrl-c click Ctrl-v) is barbaric. X11 got it right and it seems all "modern" apps are trying really hard to introduce barbarisms.

I think this is a reasonable set of objections to how cut and paste works if you were designing it from scratch. I'm not saying I agree with the conclusions, cut AND paste, is 2 operations so it seems silly to say you can undo both with 1 undo. It's kind of a RISC/CISC thing, is your opcode CUTANDPASTE or CUT and PASTE?

Same frustration applies to file converters — the UX is almost universally broken. Most tools silently upload your files to S3 while showing a spinning wheel, then email you a link. The File System Access API has made it possible to do this properly in-browser now, but almost nobody uses it.

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

I guess they've never heard of select-and-drag? Which isn't universal, but is common. And should be universal. I use it frequently. So many one-time-password forms break it in various ways, like wanting the value to go into six separate input boxes (why is this so common!?).

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

It's an interesting thought, but hard to imagine how this would be implemented system wide. The clipboard would need to remember the source application, and have some kind of unique identifier to issue a delete to the source application.

This looks so logical my mind struggles to understand why this is not how it already works in other programs o.O

the points on how undo interacts with this and the clipboard contents its also a good example of how relatively simple features can have a fairly high combined complexity to ensure the features do behave as expected if you use them in tandem.

nice writeup and cool solution :) thanks!

i see some comments about the move, and the cut & paste to be 3 actions etc. this is perhaps technically the case in current programs that you use, but conceptually and for most non-tech users this is not how the feature is presented. hence i think its a nice solution to fit the behavior to how its presented, rather than presenting more different ways to manipulate the document, using a move or other methods. (this would add complexity for non techy users. many editors which are mentioned are very complex with lots of keybindings)

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.

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.

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

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.

Is there any kind of solution to saving everything that is cut or copied to some kind of temporary history so you can paste things you copied/cut like an hour ago?

The mouse-driven EMACS I used in the 90s had a text swap feature that was so elegant - highlight one word, double-click another word, and boom - they swap places.

The first point should read "Cut is unundoable"

Cut and Paste isn't broken, Copy is broken (in windows). My muscle memory for copying and pasting text is now: ctrl-c, ctrl-c, ctrl-c, ctrl-v.

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

>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.

Oh if only cut and paste was broken... In Windows and Linux copy and paste itself is broken. Sometimes you copy with mouse, sometimes you copy with keyboard, and if it is a recent version of MS Office likely neither will work. Sometimes you paste with Ctrl+v sometimes with Ctrl+shift+v, sometimes with mouse, sometimes it just won't work. Such a simple operation should have been completely owned by the OS.

I haven't use Cut for ages. Not sure why, I guess because it is easy to move rather than cut/paste.

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

This is similar to how Explorer / Finder handle cut: The file isn't moved until paste.

why is this not an article abour the abomination of paste with formatting

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

In 30 years of using computers, never once have I used cut and paste.

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.

Excel did this and it was pretty confusing.

I just want a universal clipboard that works.

> 2. Cut reflows 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. A tiny cognitive burden perhaps, but I'd argue an unnecessary one.

This is ridiculous. When I cut something in real life I expect it to be gone. Of course it reflows after that operation.

I don’t have a problem with this new operation but “redirect” is probably a better name, and not even a perfect one, compared to “Ghost Cut”

Cutting means removing, hence “being cut from the team”. This author is either having a hard time with English or being bombastic to try and sell their idea.

this is one of those situations where I think the improvement is marginal over the value of standardisation.

Cut & Paste always struck me as more of a Windows thing. Which is weird because obviously I can do cmd+X / cmd+V on a mac... I just never do. Instead it's "select" - command+C - delete - cmd+V.

Am I the only one who does that?

(EDIT: Same thing on Finder. cmd+C cmd+Del cmd+V)

Anyway, I love the design aesthetic of the site, and when people question existing paradigms. Will definitely be checking Ishmael out.

Copy and Paste too, and its because if you hit Ctrl + C (copy) by mistake, when you actually meant to hit CTRL+V did you know, that Teams, Discord, etc will copy a completely empty text-input box AND WIPE YOUR PASTE HISTORY WITH IT?

This is why copy and paste is broken for so many years, because devs at these beautiful companies, decided to let you wipe your end-user's clipboard when chatInputText.length === 0 or whatever. I noticed people having consistent issues with copy and paste when Teams became more prevalent, and it made no sense, until I realized.

If you work for one of these chat companies, for the love of GOD make an internal ticket, this is embarrassing.

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

/s

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.