Bert,
What I mean is that the Sugar frame is drawn on top of Squeak, but the System Cursor is drawn on top of both. So if you let the System cursor display an image of a morph, you can drag it into the frame. Try this while running in Sugar with the Sugar frame visible:
CursorWithAlpha fromUser show
As you can see, you can move stuff from the image over the sugar frame.
Wow! That's perfect!
I guess I could tackle it then if there are no other takers ... I have an idea how to do that. However, I fear there are many places that reference cursors directly, so it may be a bit tricky to make work while not breaking things on cursor-challenged VMs. But the design of HandMorph lends itself naturally to a separate display surface, kudos to whoever came up with that ...
I think we could remain it if it's just a visual effects issue.
I prefer to start stupidly simple at first. What about to use X halo for cut, and duplicate halo for copy?
If you mean the black grab halo handle I'd agree ... X is for deleting, and we should keep it at that IMHO.
We will use the grab handle to drag to the sugar frame, of course. But X handle is not so strange than it looks. Because X doesn't delete anything, but actually it moves a morph to the trash can, and you can use it later when you want. That's exactly same behavior of "cut" operation. This was Abe-san's Idea, sometimes he uses the trash can as just a clipboard.
Cheers, - Takashi