Yet again, Robert (@sanchothefat) makes a good point. He vents his frustration on Twitter over the Mac’s inability to Cut and Paste files and folders, like you can on Windows. The folks at Apple argue that it’s because they’d rather users didn’t confuse the cutting and pasting of text with files. Some others argue that files may get lost if one forgets to paste the cut file. Though, this never happens since nothing happens to the file until the user performs the paste command. OSX creators and users prefer to think of the operation as a Move.

While I’m mostly a Mac convert and against Windows, I can’t argue that Robert is correct. When coming from a Windows machine, this difference in usability will strike you as odd. But there’s a more insidious philosophy at work here. In the world of digital, cutting and pasting no longer has a place. Instead, it needs to be consigned to the annals of time because in a world where nothing is fixed, and all is editable, the idea of cutting followed by pasting is just foolish. There is never a Cut without a Paste. That would be a delete. In the world of print, there definitely still is the notion of cutting, with or without a resulting paste. Digitally, the semantically speaking, there is only Move. You move text around a document. You move files and folders around the filesystem. ANd the same applies to, say, household items, or even body parts. You don’t cut and paste your TV remote from the sofa to the coffee table and you don’t cut and paste your legs as you walk.

Hardcore Linux users will be right at home with this idea as the command to move files around while in the terminal is, in fact, mv, short for ‘move’. But for the rest of us, many of whom began our lives on a Windows machine in some form of another, it may be a stretch to condition our minds to this change in thought process. We’ve grown up with OSes and programs that have taken the idea of print-based mechanics and applied it to how one uses a computer, to ease one’s mind into this new medium. But now we’re here, it’s probably time we started thinking more accurately about how things are actually working.

I’m sure this has been said before… aaaand now I’ve said it too.