Inkscape supports all the traditional clipboard operations: copying, cutting, and pasting.
Copying (
) remembers a copy of the selected object or objects in the program’s clipboard; cutting (
) performs the same action as copying, but the object is then deleted. Finally, pasting (
) places the content of the clipboard back into the document (but retains it in the clipboard as well, so you can paste the same object multiple times).
The Paste command has two variants. The regular Paste () places the object in the point on the canvas where your mouse cursor currently hovers. This provides a handy method for moving an object to an entirely different place of the document; just cut it from where it was before, scroll and/or zoom to where you want it to be, hover your mouse over the exact location, and press . You can even “paint” with copies of an object by moving your mouse around and pressing repeatedly.
Note
Another command which places an object under your mouse cursor is Import (
); see 18.1 Import.
Sometimes, however, you want to paste an object exactly where it was copied from. That’s what the Paste in Place (
) command does. For example, you can use it for moving an object from one layer to another without changing its position on the canvas: Copy it, switch to the target layer, and paste it in place.
Sometimes, people use Copy and Paste simply as a method to get a duplicate of one or several objects. In Inkscape, you don’t need to use that workaround; there’s a convenient Duplicate command (
) that creates a copy of your selection and places it in the same position on the canvas. This is equivalent to copying and then pasting in place, except that Duplicate does not change the contents of your clipboard.
All pasting and duplication commands, just as any other methods of creating new objects, place the new object on top of the z-order in the current layer.
Note
What if you have selected an object somewhere in the middle of the z-order and want to duplicate it but keep the copy at the same level instead of jumping to the top? In general, this is a symptom that your document needs to use more layers. By placing such an object into its own layer, you will ensure that duplicating it will place the copy on top of that object’s layer instead of on top of the document.
Yet another method of creating copies of objects is stamping. Whenever you transform a selection (move, scale, rotate, or skew) by dragging the mouse in the Selector tool (see 2.7 Transforming), you can press 
to leave behind a copy of the selection without interrupting the interactive transformation. For example, if you grab and drag an ellipse and then press and hold the spacebar while dragging, the object being moved will leave a trail of its copies on the canvas. Stamping also works in the Node tool when you drag a selection of nodes (12.5.7 Moving Nodes).
All object copying methods discussed so far created new independent objects that are not linked in any way to their originals. If you want a linked copy that inherits some properties of the original and updates itself automatically, read about clones in Chapter 16.