Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/02/19/larry-tesler-the-father-of-cu.html
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RIP, for real; those shortcuts make my tedious office job so much easier.
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Larry Tesler, the father of cut, copy, paste, has died
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Xerox PARC really changed the world, and these three commands were a not insignificant part of that. PARC, Bell Labs – it doesn’t seem like we have too much of that kind of thing going on any more, in industry. Maybe what Musk is doing is the contemporary version?
Thank you, Larry! Enjoy being cut and pasted into the next realm. 
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Cut and paste comes from the newspaper world, where layouts were mocked up before burning the plates used on the printing press. The components on a given page had a thin coat of wax on the back do they could be moved around until the layout was deemed satisfactory.
Still this takes NOTHING away from this guy’s amazing work, which I use more than any other command except Ctrl-S.
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Larry Tesler, the father of cut, copy, paste, has died
RIP, for real; those shortcuts make my tedious office job so much easier.
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Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it
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Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil: That thing you just did? He probably invented it
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40 or so years of Copy/Paste and no one has ever thought to add a second Copy/Paste? As in Control-C/Control-V copies and pastes one thing, and, maybe, Control-Shift-C/Control-Shift-V copies and pastes a separate thing.
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This functionality exists in some editors, and I’ve seen addons for operating systems to do it, but yeah I’m surprised nothing has caught on at the OS level.
I really like how emacs handles this. Every time you copy or cut something in emacs, it gets added to a list. Pasting pastes the most recently cut or copied item. Then you can cycle through the older copied stuff until you get to the one you want. There are also some commands to edit what’s in your copy buffer ring, by removing or moving items. Very handy.
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I think MS apps have/had a clipboard that would archive all recent copy/cuts and made eligible for pasting. I also thought this would be incredibly useful but MS’s implementation was so bad I very quickly stopped trying to integrate it into my flow.
I think it was around the clippy years, so yeah.
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Alfred for MacOS has a Clipboard History feature that I use for this (among many other things.) I find it a real time saver. I’m guessing there is something similar for Windows & Linux.
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He certainly popularized these concepts and helped make “cut,” “copy,” and “paste” the de facto terminology for these operations in digital computers. But weren’t those terms simply carried over from the traditional layout paradigm, where page designers (like those who laid out the a newspaper) literally pasted slips of paper with text and graphics onto pasteboards?
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Tesler was also an advocate for an approach to UI design known as modeless computing, which is reflected in his personal website. In essence, it ensures that user actions remain consistent throughout an operating system’s various functions and apps. When they’ve opened a word processor, for instance, users now just automatically assume that hitting any of the alphanumeric keys on their keyboard will result in that character showing up on-screen at the cursor’s insertion point. But there was a time when word processors could be switched between multiple modes where typing on the keyboard would either add characters to a document or alternately allow functional commands to be entered.
Looking at you vi
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well fwiw the mac finder still doesn’t support cutting files. because for some reason, despite every other application in the world supporting cut, it somehow doesn’t make sense.
i think it does finally support cmd-right_option-shift-ctrl-f4-v for moving files. something memorable like that.
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Larry Tesler: Ctrl+x
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⌘+x
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Give “Oscars Miniclip” a try. Been using it for many years and I keep transferring it to every machine I own.
I remember a proposal for cutting and pasting using a mouse when I worked at Canon in the nineties. That is - you cut text or images or files, and they were saved to the mouse. You could then take the mouse to another machine and paste.
Those were happier, more innocent days. You couldn’t suggest something like that now, as it would be a security hole.
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