I never said we shouldn’t try to make a system accessible from the keyboard, or that drag-and-drop as typically implemented is the best solution here. I merely said that c/c/p is at once too difficult/brittle and too limited.
Personally, I wish we used some kind of mashup/spinoff/extension of DragThing, Quicksilver, drag-and-drop for this sort of thing: flexible, letting us do more with the stuff in it than just paste it back, accessible from both keyboard and mouse ideally from anywhere on the screen, persistent and non-destructive. It’s a non-trivial problem, because we need something that scales from novices up through experts. But there’s a very large design space here, and most of it has been ignored for 30 years because the existing non-ideal conventions have ossified.
It’s exciting to see even tiny new ideas, like the utility being discussed in this conversation.
To follow your thought here: with all that tremendous quantity of monitor space available, we really should be devoting some chunk of it to showing what’s on the clipboard, or at least that there’s something there.
> we really should be devoting some chunk of it to showing what’s on the clipboard, or at least that there’s something there.
I could see that. Microsoft tried something like that with a stack-based (presumption) clipboard in Office. I don't think it worked very well. I thought it was confusing for most. You went from copy-this-and-then-paste-it to having to select what you wanted to paste. Simple is better in this case.
I can think of no instance where I explicitly needed to know what was in the clipboard. Now, admittedly, this is me, a single data point and not a casual user. I am sure it is different for casual users. In fact, I am sure that most of them don't have a clue that ctrl-c/v/x/z exist.
As for devoting screen real-estate for showing clipboard content. I can't really get a feel for the idea because I don't feel that I need it. In some cases I know that I don't want to give up any screen real-estate to anything other the the application/s currently running. For example, my EDA package uses three screens very well. I don't want to see anything else while doing this work. Again, just me.
Personally, I wish we used some kind of mashup/spinoff/extension of DragThing, Quicksilver, drag-and-drop for this sort of thing: flexible, letting us do more with the stuff in it than just paste it back, accessible from both keyboard and mouse ideally from anywhere on the screen, persistent and non-destructive. It’s a non-trivial problem, because we need something that scales from novices up through experts. But there’s a very large design space here, and most of it has been ignored for 30 years because the existing non-ideal conventions have ossified.
It’s exciting to see even tiny new ideas, like the utility being discussed in this conversation.
To follow your thought here: with all that tremendous quantity of monitor space available, we really should be devoting some chunk of it to showing what’s on the clipboard, or at least that there’s something there.