--- title: or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael description: Cut & Paste has three fundamental flaws present in virtually every text editor: undo after cut doesn't restore clipboard state, cutting causes document reflow... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael | daily.dev og:description: Cut & Paste has three fundamental flaws present in virtually every text editor: undo after cut doesn't restore clipboard state, cutting causes document reflow... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/LqvCxmaIk.png og:image:alt: or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 4 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Cut & Paste has three fundamental flaws present in virtually every text editor: undo after cut doesn't restore clipboard state, cutting causes document reflow forcing you to re-find your paste location, and cut+paste can't be undone as a single atomic operation. Ishmael introduces 'Ghost Cut' to address all three: pressing Ctrl+X fades the selected text in place without touching the clipboard, the cursor skips over it, and pressing Ctrl+V atomically moves the ghosted text to the new location in one undoable step. Escape cancels the operation and restores the text. Traditional cut-to-clipboard behavior is still available via copy + backspace. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 232 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-23). **TL;DR:** The community is largely skeptical of the "Ghost Cut" proposal, viewing current cut/paste behavior as intentional design rather than a flaw, though many acknowledge real pain points like clipboard clobbering and the lack of atomic move operations. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 45% mixed · 40% skeptical **The case for** - Clipboard managers (Maccy, Ditto, Windows built-in) already address many of the cited pain points effectively. - The idea of an atomic move operation has merit and is already partially implemented in Excel and file explorers. - The undo-clipboard interaction is a genuine inconsistency worth discussing. **The pushback** - Ghost Cut breaks cross-application cut/paste since nothing is placed in the clipboard at cut time. - Many users rely on cut+undo as a deliberate workflow (e.g., copy with visual feedback, or preserving clipboard across undo history). - The proposed behavior conflicts with decades of muscle memory and established conventions. - Ghost Cut is less flexible: it assumes a single paste destination within the same app/document. - Edge cases (multiple ghost cuts, escape behavior, cross-app paste) are poorly defined. - Apps like Teams/Discord that wipe the clipboard on empty copy are the real culprit for many complaints, not the cut/paste model itself. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Commenters broadly push back on framing current cut/paste as "broken," pointing to legitimate use cases for the existing behavior and noting that Ghost Cut introduces its own set of unresolved edge cases, especially across applications. **Hottest debate:** Whether undo should affect clipboard state, and whether cut+undo is a valid intentional workflow or a workaround that signals a design flaw. **Open questions** - How does Ghost Cut work across different applications if nothing is placed in the clipboard? - What happens if the user performs multiple ghost cuts without pasting, or never pastes at all? - Should clipboard state ever be part of the undo stack, and how would that interact with OS-level shared clipboard? **Highlights** > > 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. > — [Wowfunhappy on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009583) > It's really natural! - make a bunch of edits - decide I don't like all of them - copy the part I want to keep - undo a bunch - paste the good part This is copy, not cut, but it wouldn't work if the clipboard state was part of the undo system. > — [blt on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010240) > The problem with Undo reverting the clipboard state is that Undo is usually file or app-local, but the clipboard is shared. You can cut from app A, switch to app B, cut something else from app B, then go back to app A and undo the cut. “Ghost cut” can work across apps with reasonable undo support by not using the clipboard at all and some form of IPC instead. For example, when you cut from app B before resolving the cut from app A, app A could be notified to cancel its cut. I think this is much less intuitive than the current convention though. > — [drdexebtjl on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010514) > "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... > — [xg15 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49018671) > Have to disagree here. I think Excel is amazingly well engineered, and very well designed for the majority of the users, despite some flaws. Excel is a bit complicated for cut/copy/paste, because you have not only the content of the cells, but also references to cells. Cut and copy have subtly different behaviour that, I think, works well for most people's mental model. Namely: Most instances of cut are followed by one paste, and really constitute an atomic move. That's why when you cut and paste something in Excel elsewhere, all references to cells that have been moved are updated, no matter whether they were inside the moved area or outside, and no matter whether they were relative or absolute. (Just the same as they're naturally updated if you insert or delete columns/rows above or to the left of the referenced cell). That's why a cut "marks" the cut cells, and after you paste, nothing is marked anymore. You can't paste twice. It's akin to the Ghost Cut described in the article: an atomic move that only happens upon paste. When you copy, however, and paste somewhere else, a) only the "relative" references among the moved cells are updated (neither absolute references nor references in cells that were not copied are updated); and b) the copied area remains "marked" and you can paste again and again. Given the complexity of this (think about references that are ranges...), a) it's a wonder that it works as well as it does, doing the expected thing for most people most of the time, and b) it's understandable that you can't cut or copy, then modify the marked origin (it'll unmark the cells and abort the operation), then paste. This means, incidentally, that a copy & delete in Excel is distinct from a cut. > — [FabHK on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019224) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49007626) · 156 points · 232 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I tried replacing default Windows clipboard with 4 open source tools, and only one stuck](https://daily.dev/posts/i-tried-replacing-default-windows-clipboard-with-4-open-source-tools-and-only-one-stuck-kduqltl7g) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ux](https://daily.dev/tags/ux) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik"},"datePublished":"2026-07-22T17:11:07.945Z","dateModified":"2026-07-23T11:23:37.173Z","description":"Cut & Paste has three fundamental flaws present in virtually every text editor: undo after cut doesn't restore clipboard state, cutting causes document reflow...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/06c194ce510de619e4857eb1567e6f56?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/06c194ce510de619e4857eb1567e6f56?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/or-why-cut-paste-is-broken-everywhere-ishmael-lqvcxmaik","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":2},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"ux","timeRequired":"PT4M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"or why Cut & Paste is broken everywhere — Ishmael"}]} ```