Yesterday I posted this video about a Mac app called Supercharge which adds a number of quality of life features to your Mac, one of which is the ability to cut and paste files in the Finder. I commented how nice this was, as it was something I use all the time on Windows and miss on my Mac. To my surprise, Steven Op de beeck replied:

what do you mean, the finder has had cut/paste for years. 🤨

Needless to say, this shook me a bit. How had I missed this? Am I actually anything but a Mac Power User? Is my life a lie???

Copy and move

So the process is a little unexpected, especially since the "Cut" option in the menu is disabled when a file is selected. But stick with me, you want to copy the file with Command + C or the menu item.

Then navigate to the destination folder and you can use the trusty "Option" key to expose a special "paste" action: "Move Item Here". Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Command + Option + V to move the file.

Here's a GIF showing it working using the right-click menu (and holding "Option" when pasting to expose the "Move Item Here" option.

In function, this works exactly how cut/paste works on Windows, just more hidden and with different keyboard shortcuts than you might expect. I am personally still using Supercharge for this functionality because my brain is used to Command + X to cut and Command + V to paste something somewhere else.

Why doesn't Apple do normal cut and paste?

This was my question as well once I learned about this sneaky little "Move Item Here" option, and Steven posited that it's likely because this isn't technically "cutting" the file in the same way you would cut text or an image elsewhere in the system. When you cut text from a document, that text disappears right away, the text is saved to your system clipboard, and you need to paste it somewhere else, lest it gets lost when you copy something else (unless of course you use a password manager). In this case, the file itself could be many gigabytes, so it's not being saved to the clipboard, it's more like the file path is saved and when you paste, the system knows to move the file from one directory to another.

I understand this line of thinking, and could see why someone would argue this isn't a "cut and paste" it's more of a "copy and move". What I would say in return is that the actions we are taking are conceptually consistent with "cut and paste" what we're used to, and creating a new concept of "copy and move" is more confusing and less discoverable.

We can look at things like Windows Explorer and Excel (so I guess mostly Microsoft joints) as examples of how "cut and paste" can work a little differently technically, but still make sense to the user.

In Explorer, when you cut a file/folder/whatever, the file visually grays itself out but is not deleted from the original location. It only moves once you paste it somewhere else. If you cut and then never paste, the file will just stay where it was, untouched and unharmed. Similarly, cutting cells in Excel behaves the same way: after cutting something, the content stays where it was until you paste it elsewhere. In my opinion, these work great and most users who know how to use cut/copy/paste understand how they work just fine. There are plenty of things in Windows and Excel that are confusing, but I just don't think cut/paste is one of them for most people.

To me, this feels like a situation where you can make the case that "technically" cut and paste in the Finder is different than cut and paste of text in other apps, and therefore using the same menu items and keyboard shortcuts for them is irrational, but in this case I lean towards the differences being technical to the point of irrelevance to how users think about these actions. Maybe I'm just not perceptive, but as a pretty hardcore Mac user for 30 years, I think it's kind of notable that I didn't know there was a form of cut/paste in the Finder already.

Maybe I'm the one dummy who didn't know about this, but even now that I do know about it, I'm still happier with Supercharge giving me a proper cut and paste option since that intuitively works better for me.