Gypsy (software)

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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 Bravo on the 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.

Drag-through selection, double-click, and cut-copy-paste were quickly adopted by Dan Ingalls for Smalltalk, beginning with Smalltalk-76.^[1] The ideas and techniques were refined in the Apple Lisa and Macintosh and spread from there to most modern document preparation systems.