It seems like it'd be saner to have Copy, and Copy and Preserve Formatting. But I guess the Copy, Alt-Tab, Paste, ah what the fuck!, Undo, Paste without Formatting spares a few steps.

To counter your first use case, if I'm copy-pasting the second word (say it's a complicated name) of a heading to reuse in a paragraph, I don't want that paragraph to be another heading. In another universe, the geniuses who coded the editor realized that "no one will ever want a word in the middle of the paragraph to be in a different font, in a different color and with a different background color because they copied it like that from a website with that formatting".

Also I can't be the only person who almost never copies in an editor, but cuts and pastes back into place (so I can visually verify the copy.) It would be very frustrating if ctrl or cmd +X, V didn't restore the document to its original state.

I've never heard of that. Why do you do that? What's to verify? When has a copy ever gone wrong? I feel like I'm missing something because I don't understand it at all.

I do that too, I'm not sure why, but I'd guess it has something to do with the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it. I would guess that is just my way of checking that the clipboard is working like I assumed it would, because the behavior of copying and pasting isn't always consistent between different text boxes. More than anything, it's just a habit.

> the fact that the clipboard is something you can't see, you just have to mentally keep track of it

I will say, sometimes I do find myself wondering whether something was copied as plain text or as formatted text, or whether I pasted the previous thing before going to copy another.

I really like what Apple has done with screenshots — a thumbnail hovers in a pop-up window in the corner of the screen for a bit. Doing something similar with the clipboard might not be the worst idea — after cut/copy, a thumbnail hovers in the corner until you paste, or until 15s have passed.

The fact that "copy" results in zero visual confirmation whatsoever does seem to be a bit of a violation of standard UX guidelines. Heck, even a visual effect like a flash and quick zoom-fade-out of the copied content feels like it would be helpful.

> What's to verify?

That your keypress registered. You held down the modifier and you think you hit "C", but did you actually? For unfathomable reasons, when you copy text, there's no visual or other confirmation that anything has happened.

If it takes you a long time to navigate to where you want to paste (scroll a lot in an editor, juggle windows, etc.), it's a bummer to get there and learn that your clipboard doesn't have the text on. You have to make another round trip.

Realistically despite decades of doing this, I'd get over it pretty quickly. I think I just like to see that I pressed the correct keys.

I do think in the early days (for me, this is the 90s) I had failures that weren't fat-fingering, the keypress just not registering. Maybe the wrong window has had focus once or twice too in some weird scenarios.

I’ve had copy fail for whatever reason (maybe a bug, maybe I didn’t press C all the way) and then pasted into a terminal window. Nothing bad has happened, but it certainly could have.

While I don’t paste in place of my copy, I do use Cmd+Ctrl+V to paste in Terminal (which escapes all “special” characters with a backslash) to avoid trouble.

Many editors these days support granular versioning. Isn’t it pretty annoying to have lots of remove/add back steps in that version history?