Which is the dumbest way to fix this issue:

1. You have to remember a new shortcut

2. If you forget and you paste with Cmd-V thinking that you did Cmd-X to cut, you end up copying the files, so you have to go back, re-select them, and delete them manually.

I just can't possibly understand _why_ they would explicitly think: "no, let's not use the standard user interaction here".

Because in some subtle ways, it's very different from the standard user interaction — if one cuts a piece of text from a TextEdit document, that text disappears immediately. That seems undesirably unsafe in a file system explorer, though, which is why Windows doesn't delete a file that's been cut in Explorer unless and until it actually gets pasted somewhere else. This puts a burden on the user to remember that a seemingly-identical interaction works differently in Explorer than it does elsewhere in the system.

Apple's way puts a burden on the user of remembering a different menu item/key combo, but doesn't break the similarity of the cut/copy/paste interactions with those in the rest of the system. They've just chosen a different set of tradeoffs than Windows did for this engineering problem.

Windows dims the files when you cut them, giving you a visual indication. This is pretty similar to how cut and paste works in Excel too.

I'm actually not sure why anyone would defend the Apple way of doing this -- it's truly baffling. Windows has some terrible conventions and Apple has some terrible conversions -- we'd all be better off choosing the best of both then blindly defending one over the other.

Actually, in Windows, that "differently in Explorer than it does elsewhere in the system." is not 100% correct: there is no 'everywhere else'.

MS Office does not have a proper clipboard, either. For example, in Excel, open-select-cut-close-paste does not do what one expects:

- cut does not delete data from the clipboard, but sort-of marks it for a future move.

- close makes the app forget about that move, clearing the clipboard.

- because the clipboard is empty, paste does nothing.

IIRC, the clipboard is even broken within a single document, but I do not remember details (something like cut-enter data in a cell-select destination-paste?)

Where did you learn that? (Honest question, I thought I'd read through most new features before I upgraded to Lion.)

Just saw it mentioned somewhere in all the coverage before Lion's release. Maybe Siracusa's giant review but probably saw it before that from some NDA-breaker on Twitter. :)