The world is used to copy & paste. Picking files, or “share” actions on mobile phones. Windows, icons, mouse/menus and a pointer, even has its WIMP acronym.

“Copy & Paste” is probably my favorite Inter-Process Communication mechanism. It’s inherently user-controlled, flexible, and universally accepted (except for those websites that forbid it through javascript, might they rot in hell). It allows data to cross boundaries between applications in a way that the developers hadn’t thought of, even couldn’t.

Here’s a short and incomplete list of similar behaviors any operating system, like Linux, or ambient operating system (like Plasma connect) needs to implement to be sufficiently modern:

  • Voice Input to AI actions: “Hey Siri, bookmark this website/tweet/toot/post I’m reading to my bookmarks”.
  • “Contact” concept that spawns across app boundaries: See all conversations with “John Doe” on Matrix/WhatsApp/Instagram/Email/SMS
  • Quick Voice notes: “Next time I’m in South Korea, remind me to try this restaurant”
  • Cross device file sharing: on my desktop, I should have seamless access to my phone photos, messages, clipboard and browser history
  • Historical and favorited clipboard history: not only past few ~10 items, but also search through them and be able to pin important ones.
  • Automatic filtering of copied/shared content: be able to always have EXIF metadata deletion when sharing, drop extra surveillance/marketing markers in the shape of URL parameters, and others
  • Link and history archives: Watching movies, reading articles, replying to a post, should all be actions that can keep a local backup of exactly what you saw, to be able to search through and recall it.