Omega wrote:Nice copy/paste... bruh.
In human–computer interaction, cut and paste and copy and paste are related commands that offer a user-interface interprocess communication technique for transferring data. The cut command removes the selected data from its original position, while the copy command creates a duplicate; in both cases the selected data is placed in a clipboard. The data in the clipboard is later inserted in the position where the paste command is issued.
The command names are an interface metaphor based on the physical procedure used in manuscript editing to create a page layout.
This interaction technique has close associations with related techniques in graphical user interfaces that use pointing devices such as a computer mouse (by drag and drop, for example).
The capability to replicate information with ease, changing it between contexts and applications, involves privacy concerns because of the risks of disclosure when handling sensitive information. Terms like cloning, copy forward, carry forward, or re-use refer to the dissemination of such information through documents, and may be subject to regulation by administrative bodies.[1]
The term "cut and paste" comes from the traditional practice in manuscript-editings whereby people would literally cut paragraphs from a page with scissors and physically paste them onto another page. This practice remained standard into the 1980s. Stationery stores formerly sold "editing scissors" with blades long enough to cut an 8½"-wide page. The advent of photocopiers made the practice easier and more flexible.
The act of copying/transferring text from one part of a computer-based document ("buffer") to a different location within the same or different computer-based document was a part of the earliest on-line computer editors. As soon as computer data entry moved from punch-cards to online files (in the mid/late 1960s) there were "commands" for accomplishing this operation. This mechanism was often used to transfer frequently-used commands or text snippets from additional buffers into the document, as was the case with the QED editor.[2]
The earliest editors, since they were designed for teleprinter terminals, provided keyboard commands to delineate contiguous regions of text, remove such regions, or move them to some other location in the file. Since moving a region of text required first removing it from its initial location and then inserting it into its new location various schemes had to be invented to allow for this multi-step process to be specified by the user.
Often this was done by the provision of a 'move' command, but some text editors required that the text be first put into some temporary location for later retrieval/placement. In 1983, the Apple Lisa became the first text editing system to call that temporary location "the clipboard".
Earlier control schemes such as NLS used a verb-object command structure, where the command name was provided first and the object to be copied or moved was second. The inversion from verb-object to object-verb on which copy and paste are based, where the user selects the object to be operated before initiating the operation, was an innovation crucial for the success of the desktop metaphor as it allowed copy and move operations based on direct manipulation.[3]
Inspired by early line and character editors that broke a move or copy operation into two steps—between which the user could invoke a preparatory action such as navigation—Lawrence G. Tesler (Larry Tesler) proposed the names "cut" and "copy" for the first step and "paste" for the second step. Beginning in 1974, he and colleagues at Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) implemented several text editors that used cut/copy-and-paste commands to move/copy text.[4]
Apple Computer widely popularized the computer-based cut/copy-and-paste paradigm through the Lisa (1983) and Macintosh (1984) operating systems and applications. Apple mapped the functionalities to key combinations consisting of the Command key (a special modifier key) held down while typing the letters X (for cut), C (for copy), and V (for paste), choosing a handful of keyboard sequences to control basic editing operations. The keys involved all cluster together at the left end of the bottom row of the standard QWERTY keyboard, and each key is combined with a special modifier key to perform the desired operation: