Clipboard is one of few prime candidates for a “flip the table and start over from scratch”
-style revolution. Almost everything about it sucks: it’s largely vendor/platform/distro/window-manager (heck even text-editor) specific. It has a huge amount of accumulated complexity, it has security issues, and yet it’s not flexible enough for power use cases like multiple clipboards.. and non-technical users struggle a lot with simple cases.
It’s so frequently used it deserves prime physical real estate of one or two dedicated keys. It deserves a standardized API for at least image data, text, files, and an extension system, that works the same across platforms. Most importantly it needs discoverable, inspectable consistent UX that can be taught in schools and to seniors.
I’m not saying it’s easy, clipboard is almost by definition shared mutable state, which is hard and messy. Then it needs to work with touch screens, cli and maybe even other interfaces. And its closely related cousins, like drag and drop and selections, are also important and related UX considerations.
Disclaimer: I’m a little bit intentionally provocative, and I should probably really be more careful what I wish for, since any major change inevitably runs into (major) problems (see exhibit A – ipv6). I am partly just venting - after all these decades we certainly have enough experience to build something better. We certainly deserve it.
Yes - bang for the buck, you probably couldn't do much better than improving some part of cut/copy/paste/drag/drop. I think what's needed is an inverted Infinate Canvas approach with ring fenced buckets for each copy/cut event. I sort of use that now keeping a web service page open on multiple machines to push/pull through.
It’s so frequently used it deserves prime physical real estate of one or two dedicated keys. It deserves a standardized API for at least image data, text, files, and an extension system, that works the same across platforms. Most importantly it needs discoverable, inspectable consistent UX that can be taught in schools and to seniors.
I’m not saying it’s easy, clipboard is almost by definition shared mutable state, which is hard and messy. Then it needs to work with touch screens, cli and maybe even other interfaces. And its closely related cousins, like drag and drop and selections, are also important and related UX considerations.
Disclaimer: I’m a little bit intentionally provocative, and I should probably really be more careful what I wish for, since any major change inevitably runs into (major) problems (see exhibit A – ipv6). I am partly just venting - after all these decades we certainly have enough experience to build something better. We certainly deserve it.