Like most other Windows applications, the Copy menu item becomes enabled whenever text has been marked for selection on the screen. The selected text is copied to the clipboard when the Copy menu item is clicked. Under A-Shell, you can select text on the screen via the usual technique of holding down the left mouse button while dragging it (down and/or to the right) over a rectangle. Once you have selected such a rectangle, you can also copy it to the clipboard by hitting Enter or Ctrl+C (a common shortcut supported by many other Windows applications.)

As with most other Windows applications, the Paste menu item becomes active when there is text available on the clipboard (whether from the current A-Shell application or any other Windows application.) Clicking on the Paste menu item will force the clipboard text into the keyboard buffer. Exactly how that will be interpreted depends on the state of the application. (In general, pasting a multi-line selection only makes sense in a context that understands multi-line input, such as the memo or text editor.)