Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men

by gumby • 2 years ago

174 168 2 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

colesantiago• 2 years ago

(2020)

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

Copy and pasting the old news story has to be some ironically fitting way to honor the man.

cmrdporcupine• 2 years ago

Larry Tesler was a great figure in computing history, but why is this being reposted now?

"Inventor of Cut/Paste" is such a ... limited ... way to describe his accomplishments.

nusl• 2 years ago

The article does mention other things, though it makes sense that they would highlight what he's most-famous for.

Moomoomoo309• 2 years ago

I think it's a fantastic way to describe his accomplishments, it gives context to how early and groundbreaking his work was in a way that even the least tech-savvy can understand. Everyone knows what cut and paste are, no one thinks about the fact that someone had to come up with it.

amszmidt• 2 years ago

Limited, and also wrong -- Tesler didn't invent any of those. They existed already by 1973 (supposed date of these inventions at Xerox PARC); e.g. TECO from MIT and E from Yale had functionality for cutting/pasting, replacing strings, etc.

ralferoo• 2 years ago

Also, I don't think it particularly counts as an invention as it was heavily used in publishing well before the computer era, and was just shifting to a computing context and re-using the same metaphor. For a long time, text was printed in sections, physically cut up and pasted to a board, and when the entire page was assembled it was photographed to create a negative that was used to print the newspaper.

Just to be clear that I'm not intending to disrespect his work, just arguing the semantic meaning of "invention" with respect to this. His obsession with mode-less user interfaces and user-facing simplicity is far more significant a contribution to society in general (and ironically, cut-and-paste is almost the antithesis of his main philosophy as the once-cut data becomes hidden state - it'd be a better metaphor to highlight the data and physically move it around the document).

II2II3• 2 years ago

The wording of the article suggests that he came up with the term "cut and paste", rather than the concept:

In 1969 Tesler volunteered to help create a catalog for the Bay Area’s Mid-Peninsula Free University. He and Jim Warren, founder of the West Coast Computer Faire, did the paste-up for that catalog. Around the same time, Tesler saw a demo of a computer command that allowed you to bring back something that you had deleted. The command was called “Escape P Semicolon” (or something similarly arcane). Several years later, when Tesler was at Xerox PARC writing a white paper about the future of computing, he drew on the memory of those two experiences to predict that you would be able to “cut and paste” within computer documents.

mark-r3• 2 years ago

It amazes me that something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented. Even more amazing that we can actually point to the person that did it.

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

It's a good reminder, that everything had to be invented at some point in time.

Even trivial stuff as boiling tea water ...

account42• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if invented is the right term in all cases. Discovered may be more appropriate in some.

otras• 2 years ago

I’m loosely reminded of that Roger Sterling quote from Mad Men: ”I'll tell you what brilliance in advertising is: 99 cents. Somebody thought of that."

airstrike2• 2 years ago

Indeed! I'm writing an app that resizes and moves shapes on a canvas (among other things) and I'm amazed at how many trivial little things I had to write that everyone including me would take for granted, including copying and pasting, drawing the little handles to resize the shape, changing the cursor based on what's below it (the handles or the shapes), drawing a translucent version of the shape when it's being moved/resized, changing the position of the shape when it is resized from _some_ of the handles but not all (top left vs. bottom right)...

escapecharacter• 2 years ago

just wait until you get to the undo/redo stack! That's one of my favourite parts of a UI to program.

rqtwteye3• 2 years ago

There will be a lot of obvious stuff invented in the future that we aren't thinking about now.

bluGill6• 2 years ago

My dad grew up on a farm, and latter regretted not inventing the large round baler that most farmers use - he already knew about small round bales, so the only thing missing was make them larger and then haul them on a tractor instead of lifting by hand as you did the small bales. Despite saying the above for years it never occurred to him to invent the large square baler which the same concept (haul with a tractor), but stack better. Everything was known and so obvious in hindsight.

cubefox2• 2 years ago

Often the obvious stuff was invented decades ago, but some old people in power persistently refuse to implement into major products. Like the ability to copy multiple things without overwriting the previous entry. Who would ever need that?!

bloopernova• 2 years ago

Back before 2009, early iPhones didn't have cut/copy and paste. Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch screens.

xattt• 2 years ago

Folks had to figure out a good scheme that worked with touch screens

In Jonny Ives’ brilliance, the magnified view was done away with for several iOS versions.

This man was Karl Pilkington of technology.

layer88• 2 years ago

Which I found flabbergasting at the time, because it had been a standard feature on PDAs ten years prior. I only bought an iPhone once it gained cut&paste support.

sleepybrett5• 2 years ago

Yeah i think this was a UI issue more than a 'we don't think it's a needed feature' issue. Long press with that sticky popup was just something that hadn't come to yet... and certainly forcetouch tech didn't exist yet.

sandworm1012• 2 years ago

> something as simple and obvious as cut and paste had to be invented.

Which is was. A few hundred years ago. Cut-and-paste began as a manual process. Arranging material for printed often involved very literal cutting and pasting of text and images. Entire trades (typesetters) were dedicated to the task. A more accurate description of Tesler's contribution was that he was the first to implement the concept in the digital realm. The person who "invented" the delete key did not invent the concept of deleting a character.

namdnay• 2 years ago

yes i think it was pretty obvious to anyone reading this article that Larry Tesler did not invent the physical action of cutting and pasting paper

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

Sliced bread was invented in the 20th century

no_wizard• 2 years ago

Important to note: mechanically, uniformly and massively available sliced bread.

Of course bread has been served sliced for centuries before

kps3• 2 years ago

The alternative, as used e.g. by the Xerox Star, was select-and-copy/move. The advantage over cut-and-paste is that you don't have invisible fragile state.

However, the Star implementation had copy and move modes (select source, COPY, mouse to destination, CLICK) and Tesler hated modes. I don't know why Star didn't use the modeless version (select source, mouse to destination, COPY).

Retric• 2 years ago

To be able to do copy (edit) paste (edit) paste you need independent storage of what’s copied. Move requires new UI sate where cut is just Copy (Edit:Delete). With Undo cut is safe enough and there’s likely something more critical to work on than a Move UI.

Also, I’ve seen some terrible move UI. It may seem cool to have a big floating blob of text follow the curser but that doesn’t work well when you want to move multiple pages or across multiple pages.

layer88• 2 years ago

If you want to replace by pasting, you'd lose the first selection by selecting what you want to have replaced. Which means you'd need different selection modes depending on whether you are selecting the source or the target of the copy/move. Furthermore, mainting the original (source) selection while preparing the insertion point (target) of the copy/move is also fraught with some fragility.

detourdog2• 2 years ago

The mother of all demos had a chorded keyboard, a mouse,a regular keyboard, and video conferencing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

bee_rider8• 2 years ago

Does anyone actually use cut-and-paste? Copy-paste-delete is the less scary option, right?

There’s a reason copy usually gets the C shortcuts I think.

alexpotato• 2 years ago

Almost everything you see or use around you was invented at some point.

e.g. the following things were all invented:

- that a human dwelling has space between adjacent dwellings and/or eventually streets (straight streets came even later)

- punctuation and spaces between words (looking at you Ancient Greek)

- what word to use when answering the phone ("ahoy hoy" was one proposed option)

It really is true what Steve Jobs said (apropos given Larry Tesler worked at Apple):

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it.|

AlbertCory8• 2 years ago

Demonstrably untrue, since humanity was made up of people who lived happily without those things and never even thought of them. Probably even laughed at them when they first appeared.

delduca• 2 years ago

Larry Tesler: Computer scientist behind cut, copy and paste dies aged 74

chucksmash• 2 years ago

Discussed at the time:

Larry Tesler Has Died (gizmodo.com) 1346 points on Feb 19, 2020 | 155 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282

Edit: Original URL updated from BBC obit to IEEE post so this is a bit of a non sequitur now.

milkshakes• 2 years ago

Bret Victor - Larry's Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU (~38:08)

seltzered_• 2 years ago

'No modes' ...this was a super influential talk for many of us a decade ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591298

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315328

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12196513

aaron695• 2 years ago

(2020) and a shit article.

Better -

https://spectrum.ieee.org/of-modes-and-men

He (helped) coin WYSIWYG and browser and user friendly all in the 70's.

BBC wrongly somewhat implies Cut/Paste was 80s, in the post computing invention era.

dang2• 2 years ago

Ok, we changed to that article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51567695. Thanks!

globalise83• 2 years ago

Ctrl C, Ctrl V 1946. Ctrl X 2020.

agumonkey• 2 years ago

Ctrl Z

bee_rider8• 2 years ago

Do’h

PorschtU• 2 years ago

RIP to a legend!

jrh3• 2 years ago

Nice features but I still prefer yank and put.

Cerium• 2 years ago

(cough) kill and yank.

zuckerma• 2 years ago

What a sad story.

_aaed• 2 years ago

How so?

bluGill6• 2 years ago

One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile and someone young and fast with the same timeouts - this is often impossible)

kps3• 2 years ago

Double-clicking is also undiscoverable. People had to be taught about it. Nothing natural or previously familiar works that way.

layer88• 2 years ago

To be fair, people also had to be taught how to point with a mouse.

The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide:

8<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Shortcuts

The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents. Because you use these commands so frequently, the Office System includes a simple shortcut for performing these tasks: clicking the mouse button twice.

To tear off a sheet of stationery, click twice rapidly on the stationery pad icon.

To open an icon into a window, click twice rapidly on the icon.

To close an open window, click twice rapidly on the window's title bar icon.

Clicking twice to close a window can either set aside the object or save and put away the object, depending on where the object's shadows are. If there is a shadow on the desktop, clicking twice causes the object to be set aside. If the only shadow is in a folder or on a disk, clicking twice summons a dialog box, which asks you whether you want the object set aside or put away.

8<––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

garaetjjte• 2 years ago

Less familiar users are often also confused whether something requires double-click or not, double-clicking web links for example. What's worse is that is often not immediately noticeable, leading to opening same program multiple times or breaking some submission form.

II2II3• 2 years ago

I don't know what the ideal number of mouse buttons, but agree that it is more than one. The odd thing is it's appearance in the Macintosh: a computer where the user was supposed to orient most of their actions around the mouse.

That said, I'm pretty sure the double click came about because certain operations were costly. There is no particular reason why would couldn't use a single click to launch and application or load a document, except an accidental click would force the user to wait for the process to complete (and it could take an unreasonably long period of time on older systems). Assigning that function to a secondary button would potentially make the problem worse since the user would have to keep the functions straight while learning the system, while accidentally clicking the wrong button would be more frequent than accidentally clicking a button.

bluGill6• 2 years ago

Apple wanted to advertise you couldn't press the wrong button, which meant they couldn't have more than one button.

chongli5• 2 years ago

I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I wasn’t very interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts and the like.

I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then!

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

It's the epitome of design over function. Destroying UX entirely so the mouse can look a tiny bit more sleek. Nothing more Apple than that I guess.

musicale• 2 years ago

As other commenters have noted, it was from actual user testing, and from the experience of the Xerox alumni. Definitely the right call in 1983.

Today of course Apple uses trackpads with "zero" buttons (though the trackpad is clickable in various ways) and a lot of non-obvious (though generally well-designed) gestures like two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom/rotate, etc.

AlbertCory8• 2 years ago

The Alto used a three-button mouse. It was Charles Irby and Dave Smith who decided it would be two for the Star. It was a bitter debate, but they won.

When it was three, every Alto program had its own set of conventions for them. There was no way that could have been unified for a multi-purpose computer.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful.

I think the way the article lays out the invention shows that it was a good idea at the time. Apple sticking to a single button mouse was a bad idea. But it wasn't like Tesler saw three buttons and said "If I remove two, I'm a genius".

I don't know what you do with your third button, but I have never used it. It's not a core interaction in any interface I've seen. On my windows machine it does all sorts of unexpected things from starting a scroll mode, dragging items (very rarely) to closing tabs, to nothing on most things. It's not useful. Now the back and forth buttons are super handy, but I wouldn't say they are essential to a mouse.

juliendorra• 2 years ago

All lab GUIs starting from Engelbart’s AUGMENT had 3-button mouses, including the Xerox Alto. The researchers and engineers using the Alto found that the mouse buttons were confusing, even this small group couldn’t remember the combinations in each application, and it lead to many inconsistencies between apps. Each button had a very precise function, and they were as much modal shortcuts than direct manipulation buttons.

Even Xerox tried to reduce it to one button for the Star (their first commercial GUI computer), but from their own published account they couldn’t find a way and the Star shipped with a 2-button mouse.

Remember, at the time most people targeted by Apple (or other computer manufacturers) had never used a computer, and the people who did use a computer never used a mouse! (Except for the PARC researchers and some other researchers, so maybe 2000 people worldwide)

It’s people coming from Xerox to Apple who were the most interested in having a one button mouse! They knew the 3-button mouse would confuse users and was entirely unnecessary for most users (as it is today, the secondary click being reduced to just a convenient shortcut, nothing more)

A previous comment about the 2-button Star and how these buttons were actually used: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31750283

PopAlongKid• 2 years ago

Just as others have pointed out that cut-and-paste was a term around a long time before this reference, so too was WYSIWYG. The Dramatics had a top popular song in 1971[0] using the same phrase as its title (albeit spelled slightly differently).

I hope we don't hear next about the computer hero who "invented" the term "desktop", or "folder".

[0]https://www.discogs.com/master/185397-The-Dramatics-Whatcha-...

layer88• 2 years ago

"Cut and paste" was of course a term used with paper before computers, but arguably the computer version of it is not quite the same, because you have that hidden buffer ("clipboard") and can usually paste the same cut item multiple times. Adapting the physical-world cut-and-paste process to the computer realm can count as an invention.

qup• 2 years ago

What you see is what I get

fsckboy2• 2 years ago

What they said is what I don't get

themacguffinman2• 2 years ago

His Amazon stint was mentioned in Steve Yegge's famous "Platforms" rant [1] where the reason for his departure was described less amicably:

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

The true reason for his departure is just a subject for gossip, but even today I agree that the Amazon store UI is confusingly dense and complicated, surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.

[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

hulitu• 2 years ago

surprisingly bad UX for a Big Tech consumer-facing company.

surprisingly bad ? Ever saw a Microsoft product ? A Google product ? I already set my preferencies. I don't want to set them a hundred times. No, i don't want a 1 px border, no title bar and no scrollbar.

dmoy• 2 years ago

Keep in mind that was written like 12 years ago, when things looked differently than they do now. (Notably that's pre material design and pre kennedy (the precursor to material))

kimixa• 2 years ago

Or an apple product? :P

Good luck trying to find a thunderbolt cable unless you already know they categorize it as a "Mac Accessory - Charging Essentials". Lots of big carousels showing a sum total of 3 items at a time, and you better know the what a thunderbolt cable looks like, and don't mistake it for "merely" a usb3 charging cable. Or the 0.5m vs 1m.

Or using a mac - window management issues aside (it seems to encourage wasting screen space and peer at a tiny window in the middle of a massive screen....) - the "settings" app is a joke. A huge list of sections on the left, grouped seemingly arbitrarily, with a "Search" that only really works is you already know the exact wording of the option you're looking for. But hey, it's got fancy icons, so I guess that's nice.

This is all a bit tongue in cheek - using a mac to write this. All UX is "bad" in different ways IMHO. "Objectively best" UX is a pipe dream.

gymbeaux3• 2 years ago

My main gripe with Amazon is how slow it is. It takes me like 30 seconds to change my shipping address and payment method before placing an order. I always assume it’s because they’re using Glacier on AWS to drive that functionality.

strangemonad• 2 years ago

I literally chortled reading that. Thank you for making my day

leptons6• 2 years ago

That sounds more like your hardware/internet than it does Amazon's fault - I have never had any delay when changing address or payment method while placing an order, and I place a lot of orders on Amazon.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

I'm an absolute nobody compared to Tesler, but I remember a hack week we did at Amazon probably in 2009 or so - the SVP (reporting directly to Jeff) was giving a little intro speech to what they hoped to see out of the hack week, and he ended with an admonition: "Whatever you do, DO. NOT. ATTEMPT. TO. REDESIGN. THE. SITE. UI.", and then later was told by him that Jeff will literally rip your head off if he caught wind of it.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

But, sorry for stating the obvious, the point of the Amazon web site is not to be convenient, or beautiful, or understandable. Its purpose is to sell you stuff, more stuff, more often. I bet some non-zero amount of confusion is increasing sales. It's much like supermarkets that put simple repeat-purchase items like milk at the other end of the store, to make customers walk and notice other items.

southernplaces73• 2 years ago

I would argue that Amazon's UI could garner more sales and reconstruct more of its slowly fading popularity if it simply stopped being such a dumpster fire of bad design, confusion, chaos, searches that barely work and of course, rampant links to attempts at sales fraud.

The confusion, coupled with Amazon's reputation inertia, does probably drive some bulk sales metrics, but it's a poison pill of scrounging what you can from existing users while potential new ones trickle away to sites that are simply better, easier to navigate and just less likely to sell you falsely packaged shit.

shortformblog• 2 years ago

I wrote a remembrance when he died a few years back. The timing of this story (2005) is a little unfortunate, because the genius of the Newton investment only showed itself later, even with its failure: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdgw/larry-tesler-the-inve...

See, Apple invested in ARM because of the Newton, which means they held Newton stock. And on top of the fact that this gave Apple an inside line/competitive advantage with ARM that we’re still seeing today, it also meant that Apple owned ARM stock—and could sell it. When the company was near its nadir in the late 1990s, it nursed itself back to health by selling shares of ARM.

So even Tesler’s biggest failure was a stroke of genius.

sleepybrett5• 2 years ago

I have an old messagepad (110) and ran across it a few months back when I was going through some of my storage boxes. Plopped some AA batteries in it and it booted right up.

Still a great user interface and the handwriting recognition still works great (though it is a little slow).

Very much ahead of it's time, the early palm era was such a massive backslide (aside from size and price).

bee_rider8• 2 years ago

I wonder why they went with WYSIWIG in the title despite having WYSIWYG in the article.

Anyway, hard to blame the folks who invented it, since it was early days, but WYSIWYG was a truly terrible idea. It heavily implies the need (although, doesn’t technically demand it) to have user input produce only local changes, so we’ve been cursed with all these office documents with terrible spacing. It also ruins our ability to actually communicate with the computer, or describe things on an abstract level. People just poke their documents around until they get something reasonably sensible looking in their current editor.

Is the text reflowed around the figure or did the user just manually add a bunch of line breaks and then manually paste in the figure (anchored to what?). We’ll out later if somebody changes the font.

Maybe WYSIWIG almost works, actually. What you see is… whatever I got. Except it only works if we have the same version of the same office suite.

zzo38computer2• 2 years ago

I agree, WYSIWYG is not a good idea, and a one button mouse is not a good idea.

You can have print preview if you want to preview the page layout. This is also faster and more efficient than reflowing the text as it is being typed, anyways.

(I don't know why the spelling is different)

ilaksh2• 2 years ago

Fascinating.. you are aware of the context of how WYSIWYG came about?

So presumably you don't want to return to that state, where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

Can you explain a little bit further what your ideal paradigm is?

zzo38computer2• 2 years ago

where you literally would have no idea what it would look like until several minutes later when it finally came out on the printer?

That is why print preview is a good idea (which is possible with most modern computers; this can be done independently of WYSIWYG editing). For example, if you write a TeX file and then make the DVI file and use xdvi or another previewer to display it on the computer before you print it on paper.

Reveal Codes would be another possibility, perhaps in combination with a "partial WYSIWYG" editor which does not display reflowing etc in the editor and only in the preview; if you use Reveal Codes then formatting codes are displayed (e.g. bold, italics, etc), but you can also display the bold, italics, etc directly during editing. This can be a in between way, which gives you some of the benefits of WYSIWYG and some of the benefits of non-WYSIWYG.

bee_rider8• 2 years ago

Ideally people would write mark-up in text editors. If you want to be very nice, I guess it would be OK to have drag-and-drop WYSWYG environments that spit out the markup code, but there should be a very high priority on making sure the code produced is human-readable.

toyg• 2 years ago

WYSIWYG democratised computerised printing and other areas, arguably providing the backbone of the PC revolution.

You're mistaking Microsoft's specific implementation fumbles with an interaction mode that helps billions of people every day. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater, there are plenty of good WYSIWYG implementations out there.

AlbertCory8• 2 years ago

WYSIWIG was revolutionary in its time. Even the Alto didn't really use it, although you could turn it on if you were masochistic.

describe things on an abstract level

That's exactly what ordinary users do NOT want.

kalleboo3• 2 years ago

The only thing more frustrating than sizing and aligning a figure in MS Word is sizing and aligning a figure in LaTeX.

fsckboy2• 2 years ago

Different people's brains work differently, essentially innately. And skilled trained brains work differently than the same brain did green. It doesn't seem that Tesler's work ever reflected these important details about the world.

I expect if tasked, Larry Tesler would have "invented" the one-button game controller: fuuuuuunnnnnn (Joe Biden can't get enough of his!)

creeble• 2 years ago

My favorite Larry Tesler contribution is Tesler’s Law or the Law of Conservation of Complexity[1].

It answers the question “why does this have to be so complicated?”, which I have found to be useful in countless numbers of UI discussions.

“We need it to do this, that, and this other thing, but in an uncomplicated way.”

Well, it can’t be less complicated than any one of those things then.

https://medium.com/kubo/teslers-law-designing-for-inevitable...

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

What's the relationship with Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)#Law_of_r...>

There's also Larry Wall's "Waterbed Theory", effectively that complexity cannot be squashed down: it will out. Though I suspect this post-dates Tesler.

<https://nick.groenen.me/people/larry-wall/>

FjordWarden2• 2 years ago

I've always missed is this X.org behaviour on OSX where you copy just by selecting text and past text by pressing the middle mouse button.

chuckadams• 2 years ago

Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting. Also, except for terminals, it typically pastes at the pointer location, so you need precise aim (emacs thankfully lets you customize this, but UI toolkit widgets usually don’t)

ropejumper• 2 years ago

Which makes it impossible to replace a selection by pasting.

In principle this is false with a Plan9-like model of mouse chording. Holding left click over a selection and tapping middle click is a reasonable solution.

FjordWarden2• 2 years ago

But for those cases you just use cmd+v or whatever

morsch• 2 years ago

Yeah, and I keep pasting the wrong thing because the terminal emulator tries to simulate the X behavior (which is very useful) but doesn't maintain a separate buffer like X does.

hinkley• 2 years ago

Tesler registered a strange combination of sensitivity to people and fascination with math. The best career choice the counselor could suggest was working as an architect or maybe becoming a certified public accountant.

A CPA??

Im glad to see that counselors have always been terrible?

outlore• 2 years ago

“no modes”, i’ve always considered that to be a bit of a mantra worth following. but now i seem to be breaking that rule while learning Vim (normal mode, insert mode, and so on).

yesterday i was test driving a car with eco mode, sport mode..the Larry in me was yelling “no modes”!!!

ilaksh2• 2 years ago

I also use vim (or neovim). But that doesn't mean that I believe in modes or that neovim/vim is a good editor.

I think there is some kind of psychological thing driving this. Like subconsciously, I came to the conclusion many years ago that "real programmers" use vim or Emacs, and then consciously decided that the default keybindings for Emacs were slightly worse.

So for decades I have been trying to learn just enough vim to get by. But practically every day I miss my PC keys for things like selecting text.

At least three times I have got my keybindings the way I wanted and then after a new install or something just decided to deal with the outdated way that vim does it.

You have to realize the context that vim was invented. There was no WYSIWYG. People were used to things like 'ed' where everything was a command. Just being able to stay in a mode and move around freely on the screen was a big deal. The terminal hardware didn't even have a way to hold a key combination.

norir2• 2 years ago

Vim modes allow you to keep your hands on the home row most of the time and make a mouse unnecessary for editing. That keeps my hands, wrists and forearms healthy and for that I am grateful. Of course a great programmer is not defined by their tools. What matters is what you create, not how you create it.

norir2• 2 years ago

The nice thing about a mantra like no modes is that you're right 9/10 times. But I won't go back to non-modal text editing.

dang2• 2 years ago

Related - with a top comment by alankay:

Larry Tesler Has Died - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282 - Feb 2020 (149 comments)

klelatti• 2 years ago

He even convinced Apple to invest in a newly created company, Advanced RISC Machines Ltd., also in Cambridge, that would produce them.

And that stake was quite possibly crucial in helping Apple survive.

Plus it's on record that Apple made a total of $1.1 billion out of selling those shares, which represented a profit of 366 times its original investment. That money helped Apple survive, and Jobs decision to cut the Newton — with its ARM processor — was also part of the surgery needed to keep Apple alive.[1]

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/05/apple-arm-have-be...

AlbertCory8• 2 years ago

So why haven’t you heard of him?

Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published).

“And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’”

Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did.

As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ].

The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt_zpqlgN0M. (he IS a little stiff in this)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw

Animats• 2 years ago

The Mac effectively had a multi-button mouse. It's just that the mode shift buttons were on the keyboard.

jecel• 2 years ago

The comments show a lot of confusion about what Tesler invented. Other industries did indeed use cut/copy/paste and older editors had ways to do these functions. But the cursor in these editors normally indicated a character. Larry figured out that if instead the cursor indicated the space between characters and he sometimes had a second such cursor to indicate all characters between them then he could do what previous editors needed various commands with a single operation: replace the selection with what has just been typed and move the cursor to right after that. "paste" would the just the equivalent of retyping a previous selection that had been either "cut" or "copied".

If the two cursors were at the same spot (just a blinking vertical bar) then you are inserting text as you type it. If there was some selected text then you are replacing it and then inserting anything more you type. And so on.

Both at Xerox Parc and at Apple he actually tested his ideas on potential users and often found he guessed wrong about what would work and what wouldn't. He would then try something else.

riquisimo• 2 years ago

WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get" that refers to software which allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web page, or slide presentation.

... For anyone else who didn't want to look it up.

slackfan2• 2 years ago

RIP.

The one button mouse was significantly underrated. Using the keyboard keys as modifier keys to the mouse was ergonomically great, and anybody who complains about the mouse seems to never really understand how that system worked.

NoNoisle• 2 years ago

Why allow the user to do things with one hand when you can force them to use two hands ux is far worse imo

slackfan2• 2 years ago

A valid argument only in a world where single-hand chorded keyboards are the only interface for CLIs.

Larry Tesler pioneered cut-and-paste, the one-button mouse, WYSIWYG (2005)

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