Cut, copy and paste are so woven into how we work that it is easy to forget someone had to name them. That someone was Larry Tesler, working at Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s on a text editor called Gypsy alongside Tim Mott. The words they chose were borrowed straight from the physical craft of editing on paper, where an editor really did take scissors to a manuscript and paste the pieces back in a new order. The metaphor was so exact that it needed no explaining then and needs none now.

But the naming was the smaller part of Tesler's legacy. His deeper conviction was a war on modes. He believed a keystroke should never quietly change its meaning depending on some hidden state the software was in, that pressing a key should do the same thing every time, no matter what invisible corner the program thought it occupied. He carried the idea past the workplace and onto his car, where the licence plate read NO MODES, a manifesto three syllables long.

That principle is why cut, copy and paste feel so trustworthy. They mean one thing, everywhere, always, a small island of predictability in software that is otherwise full of quiet context. Tesler died in 2020, but his argument is pressed into the muscle memory of everyone who works with text. Every Ctrl+C and every ⌘C is, in a real sense, his monument, a keystroke that does exactly what it did the last time and will do the same the next, honouring a man who spent his career insisting that machines should be honest about what a button does.