Monday, June 16, 2008

Extending cut-and-paste: cutting/copying items to specific clipboard position

I've described cutting/copying text to a new item at the end of the clipboard list, or to replace the item at the end of the list. The user could also cut/copy text to any position within the list.

For example, copying some text into the third position in the clipboard list:

     CTRL(+SHIFT)+C,3

or copying into the first position in the list:

     CTRL(+SHIFT)+C,1

I'm counting the first position in the list as '1' not '0'.

You could also insert text as a new item in the list. If the list had three items in it, and you wanted to add a new item into the second position (thus pushing the items originally in the second and third positions to the right one place, into the third and fourth positions), you could type:

     CTRL(+SHIFT)+C,2,+

(The reason for making the positions start from 1 is that if you're going to be explicitly specifying list item positions, I think it's likely that most of the time you're going to be dealing with small numbers less than 5. If you start the position with 1, then those 5 numbers are all in a row together on the keyboard. If you started at 0, then the common set of numbers would be separated by a fair gap on the keyboard, which could make things a little less convenient).

What if there were three items on the list, and you told it to add a new item at position 9? I think the most sensible thing for it to do would be to just add a new item at position 9. I don't see a problem with leaving those other clipboard positions empty.

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