Gypsy (software)
Gypsy was the first document preparation system based on a mouse and graphical user interface to take advantage of those technologies to virtually eliminate modes. Its operation would be familiar to any user of a modern personal computer. It was the second WYSIWYG document preparation program, a successor to the ground-breaking Bravo on the seminal Xerox Alto personal computer. It was designed and implemented at Xerox PARC in 1975 by Larry Tesler and Timothy Mott, with advice from Dan Swinehart and other colleagues. The code was built on Bravo as a base and the developers of Bravo , including Tom Malloy, Butler Lampson and Charles Simonyi provided technical support to the effort. It was produced for use at Ginn & Co., a Xerox subsidiary in Lexington, Massachusetts which published textbooks. Although similar in capabilities to the then-current version of Bravo, the user interface of Gypsy was radically different from that of Bravo. In both Bravo and Gypsy, a command operated on the current selection. But Bravo had modes and Gypsy didn't. In Bravo, the effect of pressing a character key depended on the current mode, while in Gypsy, pressing a character key by itself always typed the  character. The difference can be illustrated by three examples: 1. Insert 2. Replace 3. Copy Among other differences between Gypsy and the then-current version of Bravo were: Fewer modes meant less user confusion about what mode the system was in and therefore what effect a particular key press would have. Gypsy, like Bravo, used a three-button mouse. With the first button alone, the novice user could do everything described above (and more) except double-clicking to select a word. The second and third buttons were intended for experts who were used to Bravo's method of copying or  wanted to accelerate word selection using double click. Gypsy's usability goals were met: new users could learn to work with it in only a few hours. Drag-through selection, double-click and cut-copy-paste were quickly adopted by Dan Ingalls for Smalltalk, beginning with Smalltalk-76. The ideas and techniques were refined in Apple's Lisa and Macintosh computers and spread from there to most modern document preparation systems.