AutoComPaste: Auto-completing text as an alternative to copy-paste

Abstract

The copy-paste command is a fundamental and widely used operation in daily computing. It is generally regarded as a simple task but the process can become tedious when frequent window switching is required to copy-paste across different documents. Auto-completion is another popular operation aimed at reducing users' typing effort. It contrasts to copy-paste by allowing for text completion without switching windows. However, the available content for completion is predefined. We introduce AutoComPaste, an enhanced autocompletion technique for cross-document copy-paste. AutoComPaste allows users to copy-paste different granularity of text from all opened documents without window switching. Our theoretical analysis and empirical study show that AutoComPaste nicely complements traditional copy-paste techniques and outperforms the traditional copy-paste techniques when users have knowledge of the content to be copied. © 2012 ACM.