copy and paste

text (Or "cut and paste", after the paper, scissors and glue

method of document production) The system supported by most

document editing applications (e.g. text editors) and most

operating systems that allows you to select a part of the

document and then save it in a temporary buffer (known

variously as the "clipboard", "cut buffer", "kill ring"). A

"copy" leaves the document unchanged whereas a "cut" deletes

the selected part.

A "paste" inserts the data from the clipboard at the current

position in the document (usually replacing any currently

selected data). This may be done more than once, in more than

one position and in different documents.

More sophisticated operating systems support copy and paste

of different data types between different applications,

possibly with automatic format conversion, e.g from richtext to plain ASCII.

GNU Emacs uses the terms "kill" instead of "cut" and "yank"

instead of "paste" and data is stored in the "kill ring".

[Origin? Macintosh? Xerox?]

(1998-07-01)