(Or "cut and paste", after the paper, scissors and glue
method of document production) The system supported by most
document editing applications (e.g. text editors) and most
operating systems that allows you to select a part of the
document and then save it in a temporary buffer (known
variously as the "clipboard", "cut buffer", "kill ring"). A
"copy" leaves the document unchanged whereas a "cut" deletes
the selected part.
A "paste" inserts the data from the clipboard at the current
position in the document (usually replacing any currently
selected data). This may be done more than once, in more than
one position and in different documents.
More sophisticated operating systems support copy and paste
of different data types between different applications,
possibly with automatic format conversion, e.g from
rich text to plain
ASCII.
GNU Emacs uses the terms "kill" instead of "cut" and "yank"
instead of "paste" and data is stored in the "kill ring".