What Cut, Copy and Paste is Good For

There are also many times when you might want to include material from other sources in your messages, and c/c/p allows you to do this easily–you could even include the text of an entire online newspaper article you want someone to see in a letter to them.

If you make webpages, the ability to copy information from another location into your own page is a real timesaver (it's also possible to outright steal material in this way–but that would of course be wrong).

If you write long, involved HTML e-mail signatures, c/c/p will allow you to cut the entire code of your sig and send an HTML-free message, then paste it back after the fact (and you can keep the code by pasting it somewhere else in the meantime–you could even have a series of signatures saved within a single webpage of code on a homepage site).

The Four Cmd's

• Cmd-A – Highlights the entire page (actually, in certain situations it will highlight somewhat less than all the text on the screen).
• Cmd-C - Copies whatever was highlighted to your terminal's temporary memory, but always leaves the highlighted text right where you found it.
• Cmd-X - Cuts the highlighted text if you're in a typing area, such an e-mail or newsgroup posting screen, or an HTML editor, or a form text box. Cmd-X will not work on a received e-mail, a viewed newsgroup post, or on a webpage you're viewing (you can use Cmd-C to copy the text, though; see above).
• Cmd-V - Pastes the previously copied or cut text, anywhere you would have been able to type (into an e-mail or post writing screen, a webpage editor, or a form text box).

Copying only a portion of a viewed webpage or post, or received mail, requires the use of the Find key to create a highlight, which you can then extend to cover everything you want to copy.

Note: If you're using a wired keyboard, you won't find a Cmd key–the equivalent of the Cmd key is the Microsoft/Windows key (looks kind of like a flag with a cross on it). If you have an older keyboard without the Microsoft/Windows key, use Ctrl-Alt together as your Cmd key equivalent.

Learning to Use Cut, Copy, Paste

While you still have the text temporarily stored in the "clipboard" of your terminal's RAM memory, move the cursor down the the box below, and use Cmd-V to paste the text into it.

If you're typing a document (e-mail, newsgroup post, text in a form, or HTML code in an editor), you can select text for highlighting from the current cursor location, by holding down the Shift key and using the Right, Left, Up, or Down Arrow (to highlight a character at a time right or left, or a line at a time up or down), or the Up or Down Scroll keys (to highlight a screen's worth of text at a time, with each press of the Scroll key). You can highlight all your writing by using Cmd-A.

Try it out. Put the cursor into the box below, and move the cursor to the beginning of the text. Then, while holding down the Shift key, press the Right Arrow key a few times to extend the highlight a letter at a time rightward. Then, with Shift held down, press the Down Arrow twice to extend the highlight downward. At any point, you would be able to use Cmd-C to copy or Cmd-X to cut whatever you have highlighted.

Many times, you'll want to copy just part of an e-mail message, newsgroup post, or webpage text, rather than "grabbing" the entire thing. To select only the portion of the text you want to copy, use Find and search for the word or phrase that appears at either the beginning or end of the section you want to copy; that word or phrase will automatically be highlighted. Then, while holding down the Shift key, use the Arrow or Scroll keys to extend the highlight until the entire section of text you want to copy is selected–then press Cmd-C to copy it. Once you've got it copied, go into your e-mail or newsgroup posting screen (or webpage editor), and use Cmd-V to paste it. (You can still highlight the entire page, or an area of the page (if there are frames or a sidebar) for copying by pressing Cmd-A.)

Why not try it out, with this paragraph? Hit Find (or press Cmd-F) and type in Why not then hit Return. That will highlight the first two words of this paragraph; then while holding down the Shift key, press the down key until you've highlighted the entire paragraph. Now, press Cmd-C to copy the text.

Move the cursor into the box below, and press Cmd-V to paste the paragraph of text into it.

Whatever is copied or cut will be stored in RAM memory, until you either copy or cut something else, or power off the terminal or switch users.

Practice this all over the place until it becomes second nature. Go to a newspaper site online, for instance, and use Find to select a paragraph in an article, highlight the entire paragraph, use Cmd-C to copy it, then go to Mail and paste the paragraph into a Write screen. Use this feature to copy part of a received e-mail for inclusion with your reply–experiment.

How to "Fake" Quoted-Text Edit with C/C/P

Note: The following procedure to set text you're quoting indented and smaller can only be done with text you've pasted into an e-mail or newgroup post you're composing; you can't use this method on a webpage, it doesn't work there.

Cut/copy/paste will let you "lift" text from almost anywhere you find it with WebTV, but when you insert it into an e-mail or newsgroup post, it'll look just like you typed it yourself.

Quoted-text edit is a way of making the quote indent and "smallify," and it's done by breaking a paragraph into single lines of text with a hard Return at the end (making them non-wrapping), and a > character before the beginning of the text of each line. Many e-mail and newsreader programs do this reformatting automatically, WebTV doesn't have this feature at this point.

So you fake it, by inserting hard Returns after each line of text, and placing a > before each.

First, you would copy a piece of text from a received mail, a newsgroup post, or a webpage, as described above, using Find. Then you would paste it into a Write screen (for either e-mail or newsgroup posting). Here's a sample paragraph of text:

Welcome to GeoCities Advanced HTML Editor. You can use this form to design your own customized HTML Page. We have developed a preview capability so you can look at your page as it will actually appear on the Web. Take a look at what other people have done to give you some idea of the flexibility and power of our Home Page Editor.

In your mail Write or newsgroup Post screen, get your cursor in front of the second line of text (the cursor location is indicated by the yellow vertical bar in this example).

Welcome to GeoCities Advanced HTML Editor. You can use this |form to design your own customized HTML Page. We have developed a preview capability so you can look at your page as it will actually appear on the Web. Take a look at what other people have done to give you some idea of the flexibility and power of our Home Page Editor.

Then press Delete, then Return–this inserts a hard Return at the end of the first line.

Move down the left side of the paragraph, doing the same thing to place a hard Return at the end of each line.

Now, go to the left end of the last line and type in a > character; do this for each line, working to the top, until it looks like this:

>Welcome to GeoCities Advanced HTML Editor. You can use this
>form to design your own customized HTML Page. We have
>developed a preview capability so you can look at your page as it
>will actually appear on the Web. Take a look at what other people
>have done to give you some idea of the flexibility and power of our
>Home Page Editor.

Don't worry if putting in the > character makes the line you're adding it to break to another line; when the message is sent or posted, the breaks all go away automatically.

Make sure you hit Return twice any time you want to separate paragraphs of indented text, or before and after the indented material (to keep unindented material from getting "sucked in" to the quote).

The result with this particular quote would look something like this using this method:

Welcome to GeoCities Advanced HTML Editor. You can use this form to design your own customized HTML Page. We have developed a preview capability so you can look at your page as it will actually appear on the Web. Take a look at what other people have done to give you some idea of the flexibility and power of our Home Page Editor.

Practice this by sending yourself tests in e-mail, you'll get it figured out pretty quickly.

For a different approach to smallification, check out Don Rogers's page, How to Fake Quoted Text Edit (smallifying).