This menu gives you access to functions that allow you to change the structure of the current drawing. It contains the front and back functions to change the depth order of objects in drawing, it allows you to group and un-group objects, and to edit some object. An edit mode is only available for polygonal or spline objects as well as for text objects.
Furthermore, this menu gives you access to the undo mechanism, to cutting and pasting, and to the show properties function.
The implementation of the Undo mechanism is quite simplistic: After every change to the picture, the whole picture is copied and saved. Since most pictures actually contain only a small number of picture elements, this works reasonably well for most figures. Sometimes, however, when you edit an extremely large picture, such as a mechanically generated picture or a picture imported from Postscript, it is useful to turn off the Undo mechanism, saving time and space. This can be done by setting the Undo button in the configuration panel to off. The undo mechanism is turned off automatically whenever the size of the drawing exceeds a certain threshold.
You cannot cut and paste between different instances of Ipe, as cut and copy do not use the X server.