February 8th, 2005
Copy, Paste…Copy, Paste…Copy, Paste
Multiple clipboards.
This is a good idea. Imagine: the ability to copy and paste more than one group of things at a time. Anyone who spends the majority of their day in front of the computer, moving text and/or graphics around would find this useful.
Say you need to copy and paste two sentences out of an email, one at the beginning of a long paragraph, and one at the end. You highlight the first sentence and hit command + C (Ok, Windows people, this is where you get off; fellow Mac users, stay with me) then you move to your new document and hit command + V. Great, but then you still have to go back to the original email to get the other sentence. Why can’t you just grab both of them at once? Command + C for that first sentence, then move to the second one and hit, say, option + command + C. Then go to your new document and use command + V to paste the first one; option + command + V to paste the second.
I’m sure other people have thought of this, but no one, to my knowledge, is making it happen. I haven’t had the chance to see OS 10.4 yet, but I predict, in “Tiger,” we’ll still be copying and pasting one clipboard at a time (only there will be more glare on the folder icons). No, I’m betting a multi-clipboard feature won’t become a reality for many, many jungle-cats to come. Perhaps when they’ve gotten down to the Ocelot…or the Coatimundi.
And if you’re planning to email me a bunch of technical mumbo-jumbo about how this isn’t feasible, you can stop there, poindexter. My computer knows the name of every track on the CD I just put in. My computer can add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers so big I can’t even say them and spell words I can’t even pronounce. It can tell me jokes all day long, without repeating a single one. Copying and pasting three things with three different commands should be child’s play.
Let’s get to work on that.
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