There are, in this world, a great many things that ought to be simple. Boiling an egg. Opening a jar of pickled onions. Folding a fitted sheet. Actually, no, scratch that last one. Nobody can fold a fitted sheet, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar and very probably mad.
And then there is moving a file on a Mac. Which, you would imagine, is the easiest thing in the entire history of human endeavour. Here a photograph of your holiday. It is in a folder and you would like it to be in another folder. How hard can it be?
Very. Because Apple, in its infinite, black-polo-neck-wearing wisdom, has decided that the way every other computer on Earth does this is wrong. And, infuriatingly, it might have a point.
The Three Musketeers (or Amigos depending on your view)
Before we get to the scandal, let’s meet the cast.
Copy (⌘C) is the photocopier. You point at something, press the buttons, and the Mac quietly makes a mental note of it. The original doesn’t go anywhere. Nothing is harmed. Copy is the Labrador of keyboard shortcuts: friendly, loyal, and completely incapable of doing any damage whatsoever.
Paste (⌘V) is the delivery man. Whatever you copied, Paste drops it wherever you happen to be standing. In a document, that’s a sentence. In a Finder window, that’s a brand-new duplicate of the file. You now have two of them. Which is marvellous if we’re talking about bottles of single malt, and rather less marvellous if we’re talking about a four-gigabyte video of your nephew’s school play.
Cut (⌘X) is the dangerous one. The one with the leather jacket and the look in its eye. Cut doesn’t make a copy. Cut removes the thing and holds it in mid-air, waiting for you to put it down somewhere else. It’s like lifting a painting off the wall and carrying it to another room. Perfectly sensible. Unless you get distracted halfway down the hall, at which point the painting is simply gone.
Now… the Scandal
So. You open Finder. You select a file. You press ⌘X, full of confidence, like a man who has done this on a Windows PC ten thousand times.
And nothing happens.
You go to the Edit menu. Cut is there, all right, but it’s greyed out. Sulking. Refusing to participate. It is, I’m not ashamed to say, one of the most baffling moments in modern computing.
Apple’s reasoning, as far as anyone can work out, is this: if you cut a file and then forget to paste it, where does it go? Limbo? The void? So rather than let you do something silly, it has simply confiscated the scissors. Like a nanny. A nanny who charges you two thousand dollars for a laptop.
In other words… on a mac you cannot cut a file in order to move it… you need a safety net.
The Secret Handshake
But, and this is a big but, there is a way. It’s just hidden, the way all the best things are hidden. Like truffles. Or the good biscuits.
Here’s how you move a file with the keyboard:
- Select the file and press ⌘C. Copy it. Yes, copy. Trust me.
- Go to the folder where you want it to live.
- Press Option-⌘-V.
And, poof, the file vanishes from where it was and appears where it is now. It’s moved. It’s a cut-and-paste, only back to front.
If you’d rather use the menu, open Edit and hold down the Option key. Watch as “Paste Item” transforms, like some sort of magic trick, into “Move Item Here”.
Now here’s the bit that pains me to admit. This is actually cleverer. With the Apple way, you decide whether you’re copying or moving at the very end, not the very beginning. Nothing leaves its original home until the moment it arrives at its new one. You can’t drop the painting in the hallway, because you never actually picked it up. It’s infuriating. It’s backwards. It’s also right.
Clicking and dragging, for the Impatient
Now, before I start talking about dragging a file from one place to another, it is worth spending a few lines talking about the concept of clicking and dragging. This has been a marquee feature of the graphical user interface since the 1980’s, but in the era of the track pad (that makes clicking and dragging a little harder) and the iPhone (that really doesn’t promote it at all) it is a skill that seems to have been lost.
If you have a file in one folder and wish to drag it out of that folder and put it on the desktop or perhaps another folder you click on the file once, hold the mouse button down and drag the file to its new location. Once there, you release the mouse button and the file is dropped. Using a track pad you again click on the file with one finger, keep pressing, and with another finger you drag the file to its new home. This can seem a bit like finger origami but its worth practising.
Of course, some people can’t be bothered with keyboards at all. They prefer to grab things with the mouse and fling them about like a toddler. Fine. Here are the rules, and they are not intuitive, so look sharp:
- Drag a file to another folder on the same disk, and it moves.
- Drag a file to a different disk (a USB stick, an external drive, a network share) and it copies. The original stays put.
- Hold Option while dragging, and it copies, no matter where it’s going. A little green plus sign appears to tell you so.
- Hold Command while dragging to a different disk, and it moves instead of copying.
- Hold Option and Command together, and you get an alias: a little shortcut with an arrow on it. It’s not the file. It’s a signpost pointing at the file. Delete the real thing and the signpost points at nothing, like a sign for a Gloria Jeans.
When It All Goes Horribly Wrong
It will. It always does. So:
- ⌘Z undoes your last move or copy in Finder. It is the single greatest invention in the history of computing, and I include the computer itself.
- ⌘D makes a duplicate right where you are, if all you wanted was a spare.
- If you paste something into a folder that already has a file of the same name, Finder will ask whether you want to Keep Both, Stop, or Replace. Read that box. Read it twice. Do not, under any circumstances, press Replace in a hurry. Replace is the button that has ended careers, marriages and at least one novel.
So There We Are
Copy makes a clone. Paste puts it down. Cut, for text, does exactly what you’d expect. For files, Apple says no, and you reply with Option-⌘-V.
It’s an extra finger. It’s ridiculous. It makes no sense whatsoever to anybody who has ever used another computer.
And it’s brilliant. Which, when you think about it, is the Mac in a nutshell.
