the-ish.com/blog

Back in April of last year, John Gruber posted and article called “When ‘Smart’ Cut/Copy/Paste Attacks”

I noticed that most NSTextView-based apps now use a rather annoying “smart” C/C/P implementation.

(view his article for an example of the behavior that Gruber called infuriating.)

Well here we are, 19-ish months later, and it looks like in OS X 10.5 Apple has acknowledged the odd behavior (as well as accepted that it might be irritating to some people) and made it optional. In TextEdit (and i assume most other NSText View-based apps) the context menu now has a “Substitutions” sub-menu, whose first option is “Smart Copy/Paste.”

Simply deselect “Smart Copy/Paste” and the odd c/c/p behavior disappears. Cut Copy and Paste are once again “dumb” and simply “do exactly what you expect them to.”

Whether it should or should not be on by default is the next question i suppose.