Is is indeed more of an observation, and one that's helped me learn, but I won't agree that makes it less useful :) Plenty of beginners (not all, but certainly some) jump to copy&pasting too quickly.
Automate for speed, not for lack of understanding :)
Instead of using Cmd+V to paste, use Cmd+Option+V to cut from the original location and paste. I like it because it lets me postpone the decision to copy or cut until the very end :)
I've used plenty of knowledge found on SO but I've never done a direct copy/paste. I also find it kind of weird how "normal" copy/pasting from SO seems to be. It's always paid off better in my experience to take the extra minute to understand the code I would have otherwise copy/pasted, and then implement what I need from it myself. The time savings from copy/pasting seem to average back out later as technical debt when something inevitably has to be fixed or changed.
I'd like to add that literal copy/paste is, in many ways, superior to the way it works in a computer.
If you have something printed out, you can cut up the paragraphs or sentences and physically rearrange them until you figure out an order that makes sense. It's much faster than doing the same thing with ctrl-X ctrl-V, and when you ctrl-X, the material you've cut vanishes from sight.
You know what's better for 'move a file' than 'normal shortcut for copying something + brand new unique shortcut for paste-and-delete-original'? Cut and Paste. Using the same shortcuts as every other piece of software. Why, on earth, can't we just have that?
I think this is a logical approach to pasting. In Windows, for example, if you start by cutting the file, then navigate to where you want to paste it to, and change your mind, deciding you actually want a copy but to keep the original where it is, then you have to start the operation again from the beginning.
With macOS, you can decide whether to `mv` or `cp` just by pressing a modifier in the destination directory.
Cut-and-paste isn't a hassle, it's a very ergonomic tool.
I've seen some drawing software once that was particularly nice in that it pasted under your mouse (instead of next to the copied object, or in the middle of your viewport, etc.). Unfortunately, I can't remember which software was that.
The problem with keyboard or menu cut/copy/paste (hereafter c/c/p) is that it’s a mode (or at least a sort of quasi-mode), and modes are a fundamentally inhumane user interface approach that shift cognitive burden from computers to humans. The traditional c/c/p includes no visual feedback whatsoever, is an extremely overloaded concept (many types of objects can be copied, the result of pasting depends on context and there’s no way to tell precisely what will happen from past experience with other applications, sometimes a copy instruction only places a link to the content (for performance reasons) so that closing a document or application alters the paste behavior, c/c/p between applications is often brittle, especially when dealing with rich text), and is very limited and inflexible (no way or bad ways (depending on the implementation) to copy two things and then paste them back, copying another thing destroys the user intent of the previous copy operation and can’t be undone, no visual/spatial context is provided for the operation, etc. etc.).
C/c/p is better than what came before it (it was invented at PARC in the early 1970s, and the alternative was much more mode-ful, something like vim), but is still too unfriendly for novices and too limited for experienced users. Unfortunately, it is so ubiquitous that it has forced all users to learn it, forced all software to implement it, and crowded out alternative approaches, even in contexts like file managers where the concept doesn’t really make sense. The best we can typically hope for is extensions of the typical c/c/p interaction which work like other implementations in the simple case but have some extra functionality for experienced users. These are usually entirely undiscoverable, and still share most of the problems of the traditional c/c/p.
It's true, but since vim is a bit old, copy/pasting can be a bit awkward due to having an internal clipboard with the buffer and not using the system's clipboard.
I wouldn't put that in a beginner tutorial (at least the system clipboard copying/pasting).
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