Cut & Paste. Wut a Waste.

A few years back, I was at a conference and received an urgent message to call my office. A fellow attendee offered me the use of her cell phone, which I accepted not only for the sake of convenience, but also because, back in the day, I had never used a cell phone and was eager for the experience.

She handed it to me. I flipped open the phone, looked at the mini-cockpit, and my first thought was, “Cool!”

My second thought was, “Now what do I do?”. Try as I might, I wasn’t getting a dial tone.

Though I’m a mature, fully realized adult, I still haven’t totally shaken off my teen-angst capacity for embarrasment, so it was with a bit of chagrin that I had to ask my colleague for her assistance in making a call. “Ohhhh! Dial first! Then hit ’send’! Now I got it!”

You see the connection to cutting and pasting, no?

Just in case, let me spell it out. Both cutting/pasting and phone calls used to be easy. The inexorable march of technology have left both of these activities an unholy mess…a sophisticated unholy mess to be sure, but unholy just the same.

The analogy isn’t a bad one. The basic acts of phoning or pasting are still pretty straightforward. Once you learn where the right pull-down menu or keyboard shortcut is, it’s not hard to cut and paste, just as my learning to dial first was the key to being able to place a simple phone call.

But the devil (on this 6-6-6 day) is in the details, as they say. You Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V and what happens, as often as not, is not a nice clean reproduction of your text. What happens is this:

I would like to go into partnership with you, in
order to
invest a sum of Twenty Nine Million, Five Hundred Thousand USA Dollars
(29,500,000
USD)in profitable sectors in your country, as long as you are
interested in
my offer. I got this money from cash donations by foreign contractors

or this

> >I’ve granted many contracts in my department during my
> >tenure. As a close aide to the former President, I couldn’t use our
> >banking system to transfer such an amount without trace. This could
> >cause me serious problems.

or this:

You’re the one to ask about where to eat, what to wear, and whom (or whom not) to date.

But lately you’ve found yourself at the mall movie house on too many Saturday nights…

or a host of other problems — disappearing paragraph breaks, lost spaces between words, newspaper-style columns break down, text unwraps and runs right off the screen, hidden text that isn’t, or the whole thing just dissolves into a sea of garbled nonsense.

But wait….there’s more!

As if all that isn’t bad enough, there’s still the carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing anguish of plain vanilla cut and paste, even when it’s working fine.

For we Google Answer Researchers, who spend more time mousing around than any of us cares to admit, the strain and tedium of the ol’ C&P can be numbing to both muscles and brain.

Consider all the “list” questions we get — 667 at last count (the devil’s older brother?).

Imagine all the cutting and pasting and window-switching and mousing that goes into compiling a list of all known back brace products, or gay dating web sites (is there a relationship between the two, I wonder?).

Over the years, I’ve compiled a set of tools to make the task of cutting and pasting — and text management in general — much more humane.

The best of the bunch in the text toolbox, by far, is my little text editor freeware program, NoteTab Light.

And the best thing, by far, about NoteTab Light is a feature they hardly even make mention of…autopaste.

At least, that’s what I call it. The program itself has some clumsy name that only an English-as-a-second-or-third-or-fourth-language programmer could have come up with, something like Use As Pasteboard.

Anyway, you can pretty much guess at the rest. With autopaste turned on, the simple act of Ctrl-C’ing some text will instantly paste said text into the text editor. No switching windows! No need to Ctrl-V. No having to switch back to the other window, and find where you were.

It’s not the key to world peace…but it’s not a small thing, either. Multiply these little savings a few thousand times over, and I wind up saving not only time, but sanity.

I’m actually amazed that more text programs don’t develop and publicize similar features. I know I’m not the only one who appreciates autopasting, but try to find it in other programs, or to find it as a more well-developed feature (NoteTab’s autopaste, good as it is, still needs work). It seems to be a rare thing indeed.

NoteTab does a nice job with other text-handling problems as well, but there are many editors that can make that claim.

But there are few I’ve found that can autopaste.

NoteTab…ya gotta love it.

‘Night, all.

pafalafaga David Sarokin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 2:36 am by pafalafaga and is filed under Research Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.