That's a fair point. But a lot of our computer interactions are, now, so intuitive since they exist on other platforms, it just irksome if they don't exist on Mac.

> What should the OS do if you cut files, and then don't paste them and cut something else?

Windows, and common linux file managers leave the files in place in this scenario. Its not the most intuitive thing, but people (i think) understand this is what'll happen if you cut something and then cut something again.

> magic incantation

About that. I love how a combination of control, alt, command, function and tab keys can make you into a keyboard ninja but I also can't help but feel that it's a bit much. For the first few months after getting a mac, about 20-30% of my search engine queries were about these keyboard shortcuts. It's a steep slope. And the combinations often do something very fundamental that you often use tens of time a day. For instance, I was today years old when I realize that 'command+down' opens a file.

"Cutting" is a no good, terrible idea, but a good idea would be to allow a "Grab", and then let the user navigate elsewhere and "Move grabbed item here." Mac doesn't have that because it breaks the visual/spatial metaphor.

Of course, "Copy" does too, yet Mac allows that...

I don't think that's why it doesn't exist, it's more that copy/cut/paste makes sense for most things, and the cut part is bad for files, so 'grab' wouldn't be very reusable elsewhere in the OS. Or if we're being real, they just don't have it because changing Finder is a very low priority for the company.

But I agree with you that it would be a good feature for Finder! Finder is missing a lot of useful stuff, it basically hasn't changed, and when it has it isn't for the better.

While we're dreaming, a great implementation of "grab" would be to have a differently-shaped window with just a doc handle and a close button on it, and the grabbed documents jump from the Finder window to the grab window. Then you can drag and drop the doc handle, or hit the "move grabbed items" hotkey, and the grabbed files/folders would jump into the new location. Or if you close the grab window they all jump back to where they were.

Grab window floats on top of everything else in Finder, so you can't lose track of it, and if you close it the files always go home, and you can only have one at a time.