Mailbag: October 2026

First of all, I wanted to send a thank you to everyone who ever sent me an email or a message. I read all of them, but can’t always respond timely – and sometimes at all – but I enjoy receiving those, and learn a lot from them. I wanted to excerpt a few things I received in recent months, so that you can enjoy them, too! Gabriel Roth pointed an obvious flaw in the Ishmael editor’s Ghost Cut implementation that completely eluded me: You didn’t mention perhaps the worst thing about the Ghost Cut feature in Ishmael — sometimes I want to move text between apps! If I cut something in Ishmael and I want to paste it into BBEdit, I’m out of luck. The “solution” is to copy it first, but the idea of changing cut + paste to copy + cut + paste in certain cases but not others makes me shudder. Ben Zotto sent in a 2006 essay by Joel Spolsky that covers the just-mentioned February 29, 1900 bug on a different occasion. “So, it’s a bug in Lotus 123?” “Yeah, but probably an intentional one. Lotus had…