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I've never wanted to maintain formatting while pasting. This is probably one of the most annoying default behaviors I've ever encountered.
by everdrive 3y ago
I've never wanted to maintain formatting while pasting. This is probably one of the most annoying default behaviors I've ever encountered.
- Ensorceled 3y agoThat and "drag selected text to random location". Who selects and drags blocks of code?
- discard124 3y agoI do.
- Waterluvian 3y agoAre you talking about how code pasted in is never indented the way it originally was? It somehow adopts the indentation of the above line? I despise that.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoI don’t think they were talking about that. But since you mentioned it, if you (or anyone else bothered by this) use VSCode, you can often just undo (first time undoes auto-indent if it was performed, second undoes paste). Sure it’s annoying, but at least for me it’s become so automatic I hardly notice it anymore.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoI just learned this was possible the other day and I've been using it all the time since
- freedomben 3y agoSeriously, when that rolled out decades ago it was one of the dumbest things and still gets me. I always want to start a selection on the text. Dragging the text somewhere else never does what I want it to and I end up having to copy/paste anyway
- kajic 3y agoAnd yet lists of things often allow dragging of individual items to rearrange them. I wonder if thinking of paragraphs of text, and perhaps even sentences, in a similar way might make the dragging of text feature more appealing (I also dislike it).
- Ensorceled 3y agoYeah, if it was code blocks, I still wouldn’t use it but it wouldn’t seem ludicrous.
- callalex 3y agoMany computer users have a hard time with invisible concepts. Copy and Cur put text away in some invisible buffer that some people don’t get, so dragging text works better for them.
- rurp 3y agoI would love a way to disable drag and drop behavior globally. I absolutely never want to use it, but it's easy to accidentally trigger it.
- positus 3y agoI do this in nvim. After making a visual selection I hold alt/option/meta and use j+k to move it up and down as a block. It's been helpful a few times when reorganizing things as I write them.
- Angostura 3y agoI do use it occasionally but quite often if I’ve put text into the wrong field of a form. On Mac I quite often make text clippings by dragging text to the desktop
- hn_acker 3y agoWhen I'm using my browser, I select and drag text from the page to the tabs section of the browser window to open a new tab which queries my search engine using the text (unless the text was a URL, in which case the new tab goes to the URL). I could copy, open a new tab, paste, and press enter in some cases, but that opens a tab to the right of all other tabs, when sometimes I want my new search tab to be in a different position. However, I would appreciate a setting that would let me arbitrarily switch between dragging vs reselecting already selected text.
- lxgr 3y agoMe, all the time, but mostly across applications and not within single documents. Sometimes because I want to keep what’s in my clipboard already; other times because it’s sensitive enough data that I don’t necessarily trust all running applications with (the threat primarily being an application incidentally logging/persisting it as part of some “helpful” feature, not outright malware).
- crazygringo 3y agoI mean, I always do within the same app. If I've moving a section of a document in Word from one place to another, you can be sure I want to preserve everything. However, I agree with you a billion percent between apps. I'm sure I've copied text from a webpage into a document 10,000 times, and not a single time have I ever wanted the font or size or color preserved. Just think it's an important distinction to preserve.
- furyofantares 3y agoAlso 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.
- crazygringo 3y agoI'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.
- jerbear4328 3y agoI 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.
- crazygringo 3y ago> 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.