> The first response is too general, certainly there is a way to design separate cut/copy and paste functionality without this risk. Star had no clipboard; ins

> The first response is too general, certainly there is a way to design separate cut/copy and paste functionality without this risk. Star had no clipboard; instead it had COPY and MOVE ‘modes’. The user made a selection, then invoked COPY or MOVE, and then (while the mouse cursor shows the pending operation) clicks on the destination. Presumably this is why Tesler called it ‘nearly modeless’, and presumably he thought this was worse than having invisible fragile state. One can however imagine a modeless variation, where invoking COPY or MOVE immediately performs the operation, targetting the current mouse position.