Cut, Copy, Paste Nightmare

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Sat Jun 3 17:05:42 UTC 2006


On Sat, 2006-06-03 at 08:11, Craig White wrote:
> ----
> I remember this on a Macintosh pre-dating Windows and any Microsoft
> acceptance of this.
> 
> It was the 'Apple' modifier and the bottom row, left to right...
> Z = Undo
> X = Cut
> C = Copy
> V = Paste
> 
> 'twas always thus but Apple had some power to make it stick because of
> the single menu design and the Apple Uniform Interface Guidelines
> published very early on. Microsoft saw the wisdom of this and has
> implemented it across their applications. GUI applications tend to
> leverage this to provide for user familiarity.
> 
> Obviously an application such as emacs which has roots which never
> anticipated a GUI interface doesn't conform to this familiarity.

Don't forget that apple also had the power to supply a keyboard
with the same key set with its machines.  Back in the day when
our most useful programs were written (pre-dating the IBM PC by
many years), terminals were connected by serial lines, had no
alt key, few or no function keys, and had no standard for what
the arrow keys sent if they had any.  That's why the control
keys are so overloaded and why vi has modes to use normal
keys for commands. There are many side effects to this ancient
history, including the fact that you can have canned complex
vi edit command sequences stored in a text file so you can simply
paste them into an open edit window using the standard paste
mechanism where doing the same with GUI editor usually means
learning yet another different macro language and yet another
way to save and invoke them.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com





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