I have used vim since around 2000. I have written five books, a PhD thesis, a few dozen papers and over 150 articles with it. At this point, my higher brain functions are not engaged at all when I use a bunch of common vim commands, they just happen. Documents I wrote with anything else have random :w in the middle.
Chisnall goes on to talk about one specific vim feature:
Persistent undo is one of my favourite features of vim. […]
I don’t often need the persistent undo. But on the few occasions when I have needed it, it’s been invaluable: ooops, I deleted something from this file, maybe last week and one reboot ago, what was it? Undo until I find it, copy it, paste it into the current version. Or, a bit more commonly: I had this working, then I tidied it up ready to commit, now it isn’t working, what did I do?
Vim has kept this working across major version upgrades over a period of about 20 years. I don’t even think about it, it’s just part of Raskin’s First Law: A program may not harm a user’s data or, through inaction, allow a user’s data to come to harm. If vim or the computer crash, or if I close a file and come back to it six months later, my undo history is still there.
So I tried NeoVim when it was quite new. Vim that you are familiar with, but better? Great!
The first thing I noticed in NeoVim was that undo didn’t work. I tried opening the file in vim and undo didn’t work there either.
Neovim had changed the format of the undo files. It hadn’t upgraded the old one. It hadn’t used a different name for its undo files. It had just noticed the existence of a vim undo file, deleted it (losing all of the data in it) and replaced it with one that vim couldn’t read.
I raised an issue about this and was told that the persistent undo format was unstable and users should not rely on data being preserved in a feature explicitly called persistent undo. It had changed once and would probably change again.
And that ended my experience with NeoVim. The authors showed immediately that they absolutely could not be trusted with any of my data. Breaking persistent undo is something I could forgive as a bug, but the attitude that just because something is a persistent file on your filesystem that contains data that you might want is no reason for their program not to delete it meant they had no concept of a duty of care to their users.
I liked this post (which I quoted almost in its entirety), because it covers a few important things:
I have never heard of the persistent undo like that, and it seems kind of amazing.
People do remember when software loses their hard work or disrespects them.
I can see how “It had changed once and would probably change again” can be such a powerful feeling.
I also loved it for the appearance of Raskin’s First Law. Jef Raskin, of Macintosh and Canon Cat fame, put together the three laws in his 2000 book The Humane Interface, and they go as follows:
A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.
It was a very important and formative book for me to encounter as a young designer. I have no idea how these laws haven’t made it to Unsung before today.
I mentioned Atari’s Pong recently, a game often considered to be the first videogame ever. It wasn’t, and as a matter of fact, it was a clone of one of the games from the first home console Magnavox Odyssey, released earlier in 1972:
I found it a very interesting case study. The Odyssey had a version of Pong before Pong – but it also had many other games that could be charitably described as “Pongs in disguise.”
It all feels very, very convoluted for such a simple concept. You have to insert the right cart, tape an overlay to your TV of a certain size (the roll of tape is included), and understand the complex and poorly written instructions in the manual. Then, during the play time, you’d have to master the very strange controllers (left dial – horizontal movement, right dial – vertical movement), often do a lot of work that the console didn’t do (keeping track of collisions, or even scoring!), and deal will all sorts of accessories in the real world, like included cards, dice, stickers, and so on.
You can admire the scope of this all – when life gives you Pong, you make a pongolade – but it all feels so clunky and convoluted, which the video catalogs in detail. But, in hindsight, it doesn’t matter if the included Pong (here, called Table Tennis) is good, right?
Reader, Table Tennis wasn’t good at all. It wasn’t just the strange controllers, but also the really weird logic where you could twist the ball already in flight:
Only looking at this made me realize, some 50+ years too late, the true power of Pong.
Pong didn’t bother with many games, with complicated rules, with the breadth of it all. It just did one thing really, really well.
For the Odyssey, it seemed like a lot of games were about mastering the controller. For Pong, it was only ever about mastering the game. The interface was simple: you have one dial, so rotate it. The game was fun to play, with its logic both challenging and predictable. The instructions were sparse and barely needed anyway. There was automatic scoring, which Odyssey didn’t have. There were also sounds – turns out, people really liked sounds.
The Odyssey was clearly an in-betweener, a complicated hybrid device weighed down by its well-intentioned maximalism. Pong was simple, attractive, optimized to the bone. I feel that it offers universal lessons, feeling eerily similar to iPod’s release in 2001 – focusing on just the few things that mattered, and doing them really, really well.
I often link to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball posts with a nod, but this time around I want to offer an opposing point of view. About a month ago, Gruber linked to a Markdown editor written by Sean Malseed in 2026 for the early 1980s Macs, and commented:
I absolutely love that this exists. I don’t like the actual app at all. I guess “full screen” mode is the point of some “distraction free” editors, but I for one would never look twice at a Mac app that didn’t use windows. Full-screen mode just wasn’t a thing back then, except for games. ArtfulType is not a Mac-assed 1984 Mac app.
I posit: It doesn’t have to be. It’s not 1984, after all.
I actually really loved the creator of ArtfulType bringing back a few pieces from the future into the past: the fullscreen/distraction-free editing, the dark mode menu bar, the shy scrollbar. Those anachronisms felt exciting to me. They made me wonder: What if dark mode was invented decades earlier? What if Mac had a different windowing mechanism? What if we could do it all over again?
I recently linked to Sopwith, which felt interesting in the same way, and I thought I would expand on this and share a few favorite examples of similar projects that inspired me in recent years.
Playdate
Confession: I’m not a fan of Teenage Engineering. I find their products well-put mechanically, but lacking in thought and soul, a certain apotheosis of “capital D Design” that feels as incomplete as it is masturbatory. (Rabbit R1 was a perfect example, consumed by gimmicks and strange design decisions.)
Good news is that Playdate is not a Teenage Engineering project, and that it was actually initiated by the software company Panic, which gave it copious amounts of thoughtfulness and care. Playdate is a 2022 handheld game console, and a fun little device that’s intentionally anachronistic. Its design picks the best parts of each decade: the gadget excitement from the 1980s, the onscreen aesthetics of the 1990s, the social internet of the 2000s, the explosion of indie games from the 2010s, all wrapped in contemporary build quality.
Playdate is partly made out of metal and pleasant to hold and touch in a way no vintage gadgets ever were – this is where Teenage Engineering does deserve a credit – but sports an old-fashioned monochromatic display that seems to be harking back to the darkest years of the first Gameboy… which is very, very deliberate:
I love the black and white, 400 by 240 pixel Playdate screen. I kind of like don’t want to design in anything else anymore,” says [Panic designer] Neven [Mrgan]. “It is so freeing for me, personally, to not think about the color and not think too much about, like, even things like line weight and whatnot. ”
Playdate’s games are equally spread across time as if in a horrible time travel accident – some with simple mechanics utilizing the gimmick of a crank, others with much more modern or artful sensibilities. Many, confusingly, with both. Some also come packaged in a novel system of seasons, where the games drip onto your machine at a pre-determined rate, meant to mimic surprises and serendipities one could encounter in record and software stores of yore.
PICO-8
I’ve been profoundly inspired by this talk by Joseph White, explaining his “fantasy console” called PICO-8, introduced in 2015:
PICO-8 is Playdate abstracted away. It flips the world order on its head – emulators are known to emulate existing hardware, but what if they emulated imaginary ones? Why not imagine a gaming console that was never made?
The wild part of this approach is that it automatically gets rid of a lot of unnecessary nostalgia, focusing instead on crafting “hardware” and software precisely calibrated to achieve things White wanted them to achieve.
PICO-8 has a puny 128×128 resolution that makes Playdate feel like IMAX (although with very deliberate 16 colors), and many other constraints that would feel ridiculous even 30 years ago. They are, once again, brought back from the past intentionally – chiefly, to avoid “design fatigue.”
At the same time, PICO-8 doesn’t revel in the past – it also comes with built-in suite of tools, and support for modern keyboard and mouse for development. Its cartridges are not only a single file to allow easy distribution on the web or otherwise – they’re also literally baked into PNG files so the spreading can be even easier.
White’s software chimera works because he understands where nostalgia ends and the needs of modern development begin. PICO-8’s idiom, for example, is a custom subset of Lua, an easy-to-approach language likely familiar to many game programmers, whether they script emulators or use the free 2D engine LÖVE. Though PICO-8 initially ran BASIC to stay true to its ’80s pedigree, White switched because “Lua has a small footprint and is portable and quite fast. I think any language could have worked though, as long as it allowed the user to mess about in an unstructured way without worrying about programming style.” PICO-8 Lua feels snappy and sensible. There are just enough functions to get up and running quickly without the bulky overhead of complex libraries or object-oriented syntax. Need to draw a sprite? Provide an index and two coordinates. A circle? Coordinates, radius and color. It’s fast and friendly for programming beginners.
The conference talk above and the design of PICO-8 are dripping with intentionality; even the startup chime is meant to evoke a feeling. At some point White went as far as to consider whether his console would glitch nicely if its software was buggy, and then mentions “I designed a [more advanced] PICO-16 just to remind myself to not make that” – a really interesting technique to help him zero in on what he really wanted.
White also expressly states “I value design over content,” which is another thing his project has in common with Playdate.
PICO-8 saw all sorts of software developed for it since 2015 that you can all play online – from the absolute platforming classic Celeste, to a series of unofficial “demakes” like WarCraft III, complex games like SlipWays, or even tools like PicoCAD. The hardware is confusingly powerful enough for Poom (a clone of Doom) to exist, but then there’s also tons of delightful tweetcarts, cartridges whose code used to fit inside a single tweet.
Infinite Mac
PICO-8 started as an emulator for an imaginary thing. Infinite Mac, despite emulating really well-known Macs from the 1980s and 1990s, can also inspire in its imagination.
Made by Mihai Parparita in 2022, Infinite Mac is all about focusing on the right details. Emulators of vintage Macs existed before and, as a matter of fact, Infinite Mac uses those very emulators under the hood. But the glue that holds them together is Infinite Mac’s real and wonderful contribution.
If you’ve ever used an emulator, you know they are usually incredibly unpleasant to set up. You have to find a ROM that fell off of a back of a truck, set up the drives and the media inside, and fight with the poorly-designed settings and a UI that often feels like an afterthought, with the whole thing often feeling more rickety than the very 40-year-old machine it’s trying to approximate.
Infinite Mac awaits you in the browser, literally two clicks away counting this one (there is no step three!). It doesn’t show all the possible options, but curates the most useful machines instead.
The emulation is precise but Infinite Mac also – and this is my favourite thing – breaks the fourth wall in some truly useful ways. You can drag a file into the emulator and it just does the right thing with it. You also set up a magical folder that connects to the host machine both ways, in a way that was simply impossible to do back in the day.
There’s also a CD drawer underneath, and a wonderfully seamless integration with Macintosh Garden’s library of vintage software.
It’s the same story as with Playdate and PICO-8: a lot of intentionality and effort and cherrypicking so you get the best of an earlier experience without the worst of it. Pick a Mac, and use it without worry; Infinite Mac keeps the Macs both faster and more reliable than they used to be. (In a beautiful repudiation of modern software practices, I have heard of people who launch Infinite Mac to write in old word processors not just because they’re simpler, but also because they’re faster than the modern native apps.)
Parparita occasionally writes about the project on his blog; those entries are rather technical, but sometimes also highlight various design considerations (I particularly enjoyed the NeXTSTEP entry).
Epilogue
I was at the Vintage Computer Festival West recently, and for the first time I noticed how many young people were there. This got me excited. It’s one thing to revisit those old machines just to relive your own years of (likely imagined) glory, but yet another to see people see them as inspiration: to encounter computers that were simpler, unencumbered, unenshittified, and with software you could understand, remix, and own.
I hope some of those people find inspiration in the past without succumbing to it as a whole, pushing and pulling on it like the creators of Playdate, PICO-8, and Infinite Mac did.
I think that kind of push and pull is important, especially today. I don’t love using Google Sheets, but my favourite spreadsheet is not Excel 97, either. My favourite spreadsheet is some hypothetical anachronistic version of Excel 97 that also has modern high-dpi typography, and a ⌘K command palette, and today’s trackpad gestures, and support for AVIF and HEIC.
Of course, there is immense value in studying the past just so we know what was already made or just explored, what is worth being aware of, and what could deserve remixing. But it’s not great to get stuck in history.
When you venture out to do some time travelling, you get the booklet with all the rules: don’t interact with another version of you, don’t flirt with your mother, definitely steer away from any butterflies. I love that these projects, and others like them, ignore all those rules.
I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys typesetting in monospace.
Regular text is okay – at least as okay as it can be:
Right aligning is also fine, as long as you don’t mind counting spaces, but centering already gets tricky, as you don’t have a half space to make things truly even:
And full justification is where things get particularly weird. The spaces are just too large, and cannot be distributed evenly, creating a really unpleasant feeling:
The solution used in typesetting elsewhere is hyphenation, but in monospace hyphenation also feels unpleasant, with the hyphens drawing too much attention to themselves (and subsequently messing up copy and paste):
This is why you don’t see full justification in text files very often.
But there is one more option. You can rewrite the text to choose only words that precisely add up to the line length to avoid any double spaces.
It’s astonishing, as it goes like this on for 17,000 more words, each right margin perfectly ending on a letter, no twin spaces in sight.
The author lightly covers in the FAQ at the bottom:
What program did you use to justify the text?
None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.
I’m sharing this mostly as a curiosity; some rewrites for physical books are par the course to avoid widows and orphans, but you don’t see them as much in onscreen writing.
At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?
It seems sometimes that browsing the web these days is just constant closing of pop-ups and banners, and ignoring those that cannot be closed:
old school modals and in-page ads,
Substack-style “subscribe to my newsletter”on-scroll pop-ups,
cookie banners and popovers,
(relatively new) VERIFY YOU ARE HUMAN, HUMAN_ interstitials.
Yeah, it is somewhat unfair to bundle the cookie banners into this list, but stripped down to the user experience, they are a nuisance – the road to hell is paved with tiny, slow close boxes.
Nick Heer at Pixel Envy did the lord’s work of writing a succinct summary of recent efforts to fix this experience, and significant energy expended to derail those efforts.
At the core of it is the Kill the Cookie Banner initiative, which might be somewhat unfortunate naming; while companies like Meta want to get rid of the cookie banners altogether to avoid having to ask the user for any permission (automatic opt in to data collection), the initiative goes the other way, killing the banner but not its plumbing. It proposes an uber cookie banner inside the browser settings that the user could set up once in a “fire-and-forget” way, and all the sites would have to obey automatically without showing any annoying UI themselves.
The site also does a nice job explaining the problem and, if you are in Europe, offers a take action page.
The video is just 45 seconds, and the following short thread is filled with a few other fun details of Conde’s app Hand Mirror. Particularly this one caught my attention – an about page mimicking software coming in physical boxes:
There’s a lot more delight and perhaps even sugar in these than I usually link to – but hey, it’s Monday.
After two more serious posts in this series, I wanted to stop somewhere a bit more lighthearted and inconsequential.
“Here’a a fun thing you can try,” begins this 13-minute video from Retro Game Mechanics Explained:
The premise of the parlor trick the video describes is a bit convoluted:
Get your Nintendo Entertainment system, put in the Mario cartridge, and power it on,
without powering it off, grab the cartridge and replace it with the Tennis cartridge,
start the game, wait until the music stops, then move around for a bit,
take that cartridge out and put Mario back in,
press A+Start and you will see that you will start at a random “invalid” level that doesn’t exist, which should not be possible.
I’ll let you watch the video for a nice explanation, but this I think is a good example of the Swiss Cheese model:
A+Start is real feature that allows you to continue the new game at the last level you finished (as opposed to Start, which always goes to Level 1).
The NES allows you to take the cartridges out and put them back in while the machine is under power.
The creators of Mario decided to make the game reset itself on every game over, and differentiate between cold boot and warm boot in a specific way.
Tennis doesn’t wipe the memory on start.
Tennis happens to change the memory in a very particular way that ends up being accidentally “compatible” with Mario.
The Mario game doesn’t sanitize the level number on entry, so you can start on an invalid/broken level.
Just like before, the absence of just one of these Swiss Cheese holes would prevent the bug from happening. But the holes line up perfectly.
I found this whole thing kind of fun and delightful, and I actually understood why the creators of Mario decided to reset the game (with a small exception) on every game over – it’s brutal but elegant, and something I found myself wishing was easier to do during various projects I worked on in the last few decades.
Of course, there might be an argument that this is such a highly manufactured scenario (how did anyone even find that out to begin with!?), and of limited value, particularly if you end up at a random level anyway. We will pull on that thread in a future post, because the story doesn’t end here. People who spend time hacking old games go way further than this.
I’m curious if you know of this pattern that existed for as long as I remember.
On a Mac, you can hold an ⌥ key (Option) whenever any menu is open, and often see more powerful, advanced, or faster variants of existing commands, helpful for a power user. Here’s Audio Hijack and Forklift:
And in the Finder’s File menu, both ⇧ and ⌥, and even the rare ⌃ (Ctrl) get to play:
This feels like a nice, thoughtful extension of the command system. It’s clever, too – the key to reveal secret things is the same key you would use for their shortcuts, so you can make the connection either cerebrally or in your fingers.
There are menus that treat it slightly differently, though. Here in Finder and Safari, you can see commands themselves changing when you press ⌥, no shortcut in sight:
(By the way, a nice touch in the entire system: Once the menu gets wider to accommodate longer strings, it doesn’t shrink on key release.)
And in other places, the modifier key only reveals an alternative shortcut for the same command:
I have mixed feelings about this feature.
On one hand, it has felt like dying art for a while now. Apple has never invested in the discoverability here, which I think kneecapped it. As far as I know, there is no hint these exist, and no way to see all of these options easily by clicking something on the screen. Even if you know the alternate name and you search for it, it doesn’t always reveal the key to press to see it natively:
It’s not as much fun to keep pressing all the modifier keys in every menu to find out what might be hiding in there. I wonder if an alternate version where any modifier key reveals all would be better? (And more compatible with commands without modifiers changing anyway.)
On the other hand, I really want this to spread its wings. In theory, the feature makes it possible to build up good motor memory habits, and understand some of the modifier key patterns: ⇧ often means “more,” and ⌥ (ironically) often means “alternate” (try ⌥ while selecting text on a Mac if you haven’t ever done it). It is also a clever way to accommodate power users without blowing up the menus for everyone else.
And, once in a while, I have a truly glorious moment – like what happened to me last year.
I scan a lot of documents, and merge them into PDFs using a database application called DevonThink. The process usually goes like this: I drag individual page files, select them, right click, and choose Merge:
But at the end of that process, I am left with the extra original files I no longer need, so I have to select these, and then delete them:
Not a big deal, but any “not a big deal” becomes a big deal if you have to do it dozens of times a month.
Yet, only after years of doing it this way, I had a thought. More precisely, my fingers had a thought. Surely, more people must be facing this issue? So, on a lark, I pressed ⌥ with the menu open, and saw this:
The precise option I needed was there all along, with a perfect label, hiding exactly in a place and under a key combination that was the first thing my fingers naturally tried.
I smiled so much. It’s a really great feeling when you’re rewarded for learning a pattern, when your motor memory does the job for you, and when you sense you’re on the same wavelength as software’s creators. Someone was there ahead of me and cleaned up this rare path for me.
Phones grow big and their top edges inch closer and closer toward the horizon. Over time, iOS and apps moved some of the important surfaces to the bottom (for better or worse – I still struggle with seeing results and completions appearing above inputs), and the well-designed Reachability gesture helps, too.
Still, the iOS web browser called Quiche Browser chose to tackle the problem, not the symptoms. It offers “Comfort Mode,” where you can ask it to move down the top edge of a bunch of surfaces closer to your fingers:
On top of that, true to the spirit of the app which revels in power-user customization, Quiche Browser allows you to decide precisely where the top should go in order to accommodate different people’s hands, and it even offers to do so per surface:
These are the affected surfaces with the option off and on:
The author, Greg de J., expanded on that on Threads:
While designing Comfort Mode in Quiche Browser, a tricky problem I had to be thoughtful about:
When you hold your phone in your right hand, favorite icons in the top left are harder to reach than ones on the right.
Search suggestions don’t have this problem, since they span the width of the screen.
That’s why favorites need to sit slightly lower than search suggestions, and why Comfort Mode lets you position both independently, so they all stay easy to reach one-handed.
It’s an interesting idea and I wonder if it’s seeing a lot of use.
The only design thought I had was: could the top space be filled or stylized so that this looks more intentional, rather than a potential rendering bug? Reachability does a good job of making it feel physical and adding a little arrow:
Then again, given my job, my brain might be perfectly primed to see rendering errors everywhere.
Dragging and dropping files with your mouse in the Finder is nice, but there are many moments you wanna reach for the keyboard instead. Finder supports that. You dragged the file to a wrong place by accident? ⌘Z can undo it in a jiffy. You already have the right windows open? ⌘C and ⌘V can start a copy faster than the fastest of mouse gestures. And for cutting, there’s always…
…well, no, there isn’t. To the best of my knowledge, the Cut item in the menu never lights up around files or folders; you simply cannot ⌘X or cut in the Finder.
I think I understand the reasoning here. Of the Fantastic Four that is ⌘ZXCV, it’s ⌘X that is the truly dangerous one. Putting something in a clipboard is always a balancing act – a moment of inattention, and ⌘X turns into Delete. We generally accept it for text because the stakes are not very high, and text undo is basically too cheap to meter. Even then, occasionally, disaster strikes.
For files, the stakes are quite a bit higher. The creators of the File Explorer in Windows knew all that – yet, Cut still works there:
The way this is done is that the file isn’t immediately removed and put on the clipboard. No, only the intention of cut is registered – one half of the handshake, if you will – but the file stays put and nothing happens until the deal gets closed via a subsequent paste.
Or, almost nothing. There is a signal that ⌘X took effect – the cut files turn slightly transparent to indicate they put on their shoes and they’re ready to go. But if you don’t finish the paste, they become solid again the moment you cut something else, or when you restart the computer. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a timeout, too, although I couldn’t verify that.)
I am not sure why macOS doesn’t do it the same way, particularly since they have a half-finished state designed already, for copying larger selections:
This feels like a strange omission I don’t fully understand, particularly given that it was vintage Mac OS that put the ⌘XCV combination on the map:
What’s even stranger is that the Finder has a command to move files – but an unusual one, buried inside the secret area in one of the menus, as an ⌥ alt to Paste:
It works. By putting the action on the other side, it avoids the “file floating in outer space” challenge, too. But it’s so undiscoverable that even though Move Item Here was introduced in 2011, I only learned about it a month ago as I started researching this more – and even though I know about it now, it still feels profoundly alien, being on the wrong side of the cut/paste continental divide.
In a reversal of typical state of things, it feels to me is that it was Mac that did a simple/cheap thing, and Windows that spent extra effort to dress it up into clothes of an existing Cut for reasons of familiarity, consistency, and better experience. Sure, a keyboard way to move files like Move Item Here is somewhat valuable, but nowhere near as valuable as a traditional cut, put under ⌘X ahead of ⌘V, working the same as everywhere else for years, even for decades, as one of the first denizens of motor memories all around the world.
I call it “Ghost Cut”, and it works like this: pressing Ctrl+X fades the selected text and makes it inert—you can’t click on the cut text and the cursor just kind of leaps over it, but it is still present in the document. Nothing is placed in the clipboard at this point and there is nothing to undo. If you decide you don’t want to paste then hitting Escape will restore the text to its active editable state.
I do not think this is a good idea. It seems like McGugan proposes somewhat arbitrary reasons that cut and paste are “broken,” and to me the proposal fails even within his own framework: for example, it still doesn’t avoid the reflow, but moves it to the other side, making paste feel unstable (the included JavaScript playground feels disorienting to use). I think it also is at odds with the editor’s own about page, which talks about distraction and simplicity – and yet, what’s introduced here is a host of complex new things: a new visual state for cut text (that looks like AI autocomplete), some new logic to avoid moving into the cut text (which will also prevent easy selection adjustments), likely new confusion around undo, and a necessary new Esc gesture to get rid of a cut you decided not to pursue.
But! There is something interesting in seeing this ghost text, and specific critique aside, it is fun to see experiments like these, with interactive explainers, poking at long-established interactions. Just yesterday, a second one appeared: an interesting new way to extend selection upwards – similar to double and triple clicking on text, but via the keyboard. This is the power of prototyping: sometimes seeing an idea you disagree with is the only thing that can unlock a different solution in your head.
Let’s go back to cut and paste, though. You will notice that what’s listed as a precedent is not File Explorer, but Excel. It also doesn’t immediately remove selected cells on cut, but leave them in a temporary “possibly getting moved or removed” state first, only to have them disappear after paste:
Why is that? I believe out of a similar principle, but a distinct reason that File Explorer too opts to leave a cut ghost behind. The stakes are higher in a different sense: cells refer to other cells. Were the removed cells to disappear immediately, you might witness the rest of the spreadsheet error out or show zeroes, as its formulas start pointing to emptiness.
And it’s a good principle to generally avoid frightening your users.
Here’s an example from Numbers, which doesn’t do ghosting, making cut a bad choice to do a simple move, as it doesn’t even recover after paste:
