Yes, that’s Internet Explorer for you. It’s very misleading, because in other locations Microsoft uses “shortcut” to mean what might be called an “alias”: an icon in one location that, when triggered, calls a program from another. Firefox on Windows has the same menu item under its proper name: “Copy link location”.
[li]The Oxford Dictionary is built right into the OS: click on a word in any application and then press Ctrl+Command+D and you’ll see a popup with the definition.[/li]
Hmm. I wish I could use the feature on this four month-old Imac, but I don’t see any of the keys on my keyboard to make it happen. Sheeet. 
Actually, I do see a D key and one that says “control,” but no “Command.” And when I place the cursor over a word and click it, nothing happens. Cripes!
One of many, many, many reasons I use Firefox exclusively.
Oh well – I can’t get the funny symbol character to “stick” – it keeps turning to a question mark.
See post 69 above for a successful example of the Command key’s marking.
When was this dictionary thing introduced? I can’t make it work on my Tiger laptop, and I do know where all those keys are.
I couldn’t get it to work in Firefox, but I got it to work in Safari and Text Edit. I’m on Tiger.
I solve that by tilting the mouse to one side. It still stays “clicked,” but the optical sensor moves far enough from the mousepad to disengage the tracking. It just took me a few tries to get this procedure down.
This seems unnatural to me. Why wouldn’t you just select all the files and drag them to their destination? When I’m shuffling files around, I usually have two finder windows open: one for source and one for destination. Even if I don’t, I’ll just drag through the hierarchy.
That magnetic cord is a wonderful invention. I praised it again last week when I was working at the kitchen table. The cord was plugged in, and the dog went charging between the table and the wall. He caught the cord on his chest and yanked the magnetic connector apart. An 80-pound dog at that speed would have sent my old Windows notebook computer crashing to the floor. With the Mac, I just plugged it back in and kept working.
Because it’s easy to ‘drop’ them in mid drag, even with two windows open. And also, if you have a complicated selection, it’s easy to make one wrong click when preparing to drag, and lose the whole selection and have to build it up again from the start. Copy or Cut freezes the selection and places it in temporary storage until it is Pasted.
And Cut relieves you of having to delete the source files afterwards. (This could be done by a suitable Move command as well.)
What he said.
I find it too easy to bungle the drag operation when I have five hundred files on the line. Maybe the mouse hits a crack in the desktop and jerks to a stop causing my finger to bump and putting the files in never never land.
I think if I were using my Mac as my work machine I would simply drop into a Unix shell and move files with the command line for complex moves.
True.
No easier than missing the modifier key in the middle of selecting and blowing the whole thing. With complicated selections, I tend to snag a few files, drag them where they go, snag a few more, and so forth.
So does dragging them to move.
I absolutely agree. If there’s a pattern to what I’m doing, I do exactly that. If I want to snag every file with “2005” in the title, it’s much easier to use a shell to do the select and move than to scan through clicking on names.
Thanks! 
I hate click-through in most circumstances. Menus change based on what application they’re attached to. Even when the menus are the same in nearly every application, you can get in trouble. I don’t want to be saving document 1 in application A when I think I’m saving document 4 in application Y, especially when if I screw up I lose some work. There’s a lot more potential for error in the Window’s mixed metaphor for windows.
The separation between the active and background apps is intentional. A (not so) side benefit is the Mac menu bar: you don’t have to aim to hit it, the cursor stops at the end of the screen no matter how fast or hard you’re moving it. From a user interface point of view, this is a lot better than having a narrow band attached to the window that you have to aim accurately to hit.
For much the same reason, I hate the thing that OpalCat likes. I’ve accidentally resized windows in Windows that I just wanted to click on to bring to the front, or wanted to move, but yet when I actually want to use the edge resizing the target for grabbable area to do that is only a few pixels wide, making it a pain in the ass to hit sometimes. Easy to screw up, harder to use intentionally = not a behavior I like. Having a clearly defined and consistent area for resizing is superior in my view.
Besides mixing paradigms, another reason there’s no “cut” with files is that it’s usually a better idea to err on the side of non-destruction when there’s a possibility of user error. What happens if you cut files but never paste them? Do they go to limbo? Get erased but not copied? What if you forget that you have them “cut” and later try to cut and paste something else? Oops, just lost the files you cut, unless the system defaults to losing your first selection, in which case you still didn’t manage to move the files you initially wanted to move.
I’ll throw out a gripe in relation to file manipulation in OS X. One thing that could be done better is the “move” option. You can move files from one disk to another by grabbing them and holding down cmd while dropping them onto your destination location. That changes the drag behavior from “move if within the same volume, otherwise copy” to “copy files from location A to B and delete them from A if on a different volume”. Unfortunately, the progress window you get when you do this is indistinguishable from a regular copy window. It should be labeled “Moving files . . .” not “Copying files . . .” to make it clear what’s going on.