Yesterday after reading a few people say that you can’t copy and paste in the Finder, I quickly put together this screencast with Screenflow. Take a look.
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8 thoughts on “Video Quick Tip: Copy and Paste in Leopard’s Finder”
Cut (cmd+X) & Paste (cmd+V)
vs
Copy (cmd+C) & Paste (cmd+V)
OS X won’t do the first one – but not the second, that’s what the comments were about…
*but the second…
exactly, zippi.
The cut and paste happens in a drag and drop or hold down option to perform a copy on drag. The one thing about copy and paste in the 2 platform is in the Open/Save dialogue you can’t copy/paste/move or even rename in Mac OS – this is the most frustrating thing as a switcher.
@ Tiny Elvis
Yeah I liked that .. was long ago:P
Sometimes you have to force Cut and Paste when dragging by pressing the CMD key. If you don’t, it will only copy the file, without removing it from the other folder.
I use this tip when I drag something from or to an external drive.
I agree. Copy and paste works just fine, but Cut and paste is not working for me and have not been working neither in Tiger or Leopard.
@Michael: Please give it a try and see you can get it working. If not, is this not one of the most strange bugs in OS X?
@Lars
For some reason cut and paste doesn’t work in the finder. Instead you have to drag the files where you want them to go. So if you want to move something from the desktop to your documents folder, you would simply drag it over there.
Not sure why Apple has made that choice – but that’s the way it works for now for better or worse.
I found a thread here on the apple forums here https://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6492927 it is now read only because it’s been ‘answered’. This is really annoying the “answer” says it’s a user experience debate and he gets around it by having shortcuts in his finder ‘places’ tab. What about when moving stuff in an ad hoc manor like moving songs around in your music collection. You can never account for what destinations you may need. dragging is far more dangerous. Cut and Paste is precise. The windows implementation doesn’t cut anything to memory just a location. If you cut 2 things the the first item is left unscathed and the latest location is remembered, represented by a greyed out icon. Moving simply the reference in the disk index (or FAT) therefore being instant no matter if its a 1 gig video. So I’m afraid the copy and paste and delete doesn’t cut it nor the dangerous drag and drop. Why is there a cut menu menu item in the finder drop down menu anyhow? just to confuse us? I’m sorry “this is the Apple way – deal with it” is rubbish, but I have no choice. So I’m on the lookout for a cut and paste featured finder replacement.