>I don't think it's at all obvious which way is _correct_.

From a UX perspective the answer is pretty clear. Copy/Cut/Paste is the winning paradigm, which empirically makes it the correct way.

But, again, this isn't really cut and paste at all. It's more like "note position, and _then_ atomically cut and paste". Cutting and pasting files in Windows doesn't work at all like cutting and pasting anything else.

Someone who had never used Windows might reasonably expect, on finding 'cutting' a file did something, that if they never pasted the file would just be deleted, because that's how cut and past normally works.

In fact, I have used Windows since 3.11, and until reading your comment I thought that cutting without pasting would delete the file!

That's not true at all! The moment you cut a file on windows it is marked as hidden, which makes it disappear with default settings. It's treu that unless you paste it it will remain there in practice, but the UX gets it right.

Furthermore, you can cut once and paste to several places, with predictable semantics identical to every other implementation of cut+paste (though performance of the first paste will be different from subsequent ones).

Edit: I was entirely wrong about the second part, which does undermine my point considerably.

You were wrong about the 1st part too. Cut files don't change attributes and don't disappear.

At least Explorer marks them as hidden when you cut them, I didn't check the file attributes.