I’ve been using ctrl+c for copy and ctrl+v for paste for over a decade in my linux terminal by remapping the interrupt to ctrl+x.
It’s basic ergonomics and user friendliness.
I do it on all my personal devices and servers.
Nothing bad happened in those ~15 years that I’ve been doing that. What the fuck are you arguing about?
I might actually do that too, but not for ergonomics. I’m just going nuts with sometimes ctrl-c,. sometimes ctrl-shift-c, sometimes ctrl-ins
If you need any help, ping me and I’ll share my setup.
The reason you gave still falls under the concept of ergonomics.
From wikipedia:
Ergonomics, also known as human factors or human factors engineering (HFE), is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals of human factors engineering are to reduce human error, increase productivity and system availability, and enhance safety, health and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and equipment.
It would be a more ergonomic (and less error prone) system if you modify the shortcuts so that you don’t fumble them.
What terminal app do you use, and what do you use to do the remapping?
My current setup:
~/.bashrc
stty intr \^x bind -f ~/.inputrc~/.inputrc
set bind-tty-special-chars off set colored-stats on set show-all-if-ambiguous on set show-all-if-unmodified on set completion-ignore-case on set completion-query-items -1 set page-completions off "\e[1;5C": forward-word "\e[1;5D": backward-word "\C-h": nop "\C-s":"\C-asudo "And in Konsole I have remapped copy to ctrl+C and paste to ctrl+V .
I honestly don’t remember what each config line is for, cause it has been so long ago. And probably you don’t want all of that. Probably best to throw it into an AI and let it explain it line by line.
Thanks! I’m using konsole too, so that’s good to know. Do you remap something else to produce the ctrl-c character?
No, I press ctrl + c on my keyboard and in Konsole settings it is ctrl + c for copy
The point for me is that I will have 30 years of muscle memory to overcome
Mapping copy and paste to different modifer helped for me. Alt or Mod1 + c or v is easy to reach.
there’s a growing adoption of keyboards with custom firmware– programmable keyboards
- There’s an error
- You have computers? We have computers to send keystrokes to our computers!
Edit: i mean, there’s software to remap your keyboard.
Wait till you find out that your SSD has it’s own CPU, RAM and is running software on it’s own micro-OS just for writing bits to flash storage.
Wait even more until you find out the same is true for your SIM card.
If you survive the shock, you could go on and write software that runs entirely on your SIM card in fucking JAVA.
Sup dawg. I heard you like microprocessors.
Hey, this is one of the reasons I bought this keyboard!
For a couple extra bucks you can get them to make each individual key a separate key code by asking them to convert it to Single Usage Code Firmware, which is so nifty to me!
you can remap keys with any keyboards
While correct, for the keyboard I linked, when you press F13 through F24 it sends Shift+F1 through Shift+F12. Which is not impossible to remap, but what if you need to press Shift+F1?
There is an unintended benefit to putting an obstacle between people who don’t know how to use the terminal and pasting code into it.
Expanding on this, we could make it so that root must use ed(1) to edit files?
“Ed is the standard text editor.”
No, only vi
vi is so outdated, we use viii now. You’re two versions behind!
you’re evil. i love it.
Control+C is used to kill a process in the terminal and that shouldn’t be overwritten. If it is, you’d have to create a totally separate key binding to kill a process. Seems unnecessarily complex when Control+Shift+C works just fine.
The article doesn’t suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.
what about shift+insert amd ctrl+insert thats literally already there
Because lots of people don’t have an insert key?
standards.xkcd
Holy shit can you guys read the article please? It’s an existing standard and a dedicated keycode
I think at this point XKCD should be a TLD.
I would join lemmy.xkcd in a heartbeat.
Kitty has a setting that makes Ctrl-C copy text, but only if you’ve selected something. If you haven’t it does a regular break. Best of both worlds!
Another KiTTY user! Can you share that setting?
Had to look it up for you. I use (in kitty.conf):
map ctrl+c copy_and_clear_or_interrupt map ctrl+v paste_from_clipboardObviously you only need the first one for the copy bit but having paste as well is nice.
Control+C is used to kill a process in the terminal and that shouldn’t be overwritten.
Agreed. The post didn’t suggest that.
Seems unnecessarily complex when Control+Shift+C works just fine.
For people already using programmable keyboards global copy/paste shortcuts are a nice perk.
I spend nearly all my day in a browser or a terminal and as I use a terminal and browser that already support this, the effect is 99% complete.
I feel like you may have misunderstood the article. It’s talking about how support is increasing for dedicated Copy keys, and that programmable keyboards make it easy to use dedicated Copy keys. The article does not mention changing the behaviour of Ctrl-C.
towards universal copy paste keyboard shortcuts
What else does this say?
And I’m pretty sure this key combination predates copy and paste key combinations.
Come on, having a 3-key combo for such a common task is a PITA. There’s a reason people have been complaining about this for decades.
The first time you accidentally type Control-C into a terminal and cancel an important process when you meant to copy some text it becomes a PITA.
Exactly. I do it pretty regularly and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years.
And yet people here are still saying “no biggie”. It’s pure status quo bias.
No, it’s recognising that terminal has its own rules and the learned Ctrl+C for copy has no sense… Okay, C-Copy. Some sense. Now, Ctrl+V for… vaste? :)
All while having an Insert fucking button.
In the end, me personally does not care as long as Ctrl+C continues to be the process-killer
Sun keyboards had dedicated copy and paste keys.
Also the illusive “Stop” key that you needed to break into the boot rom.
That’s what I came here to say. What’s the point in making an unnecessarily complex “hack” to circumvent what shift-control-c and v does? I’ve never had a problem with it. And there’s something to be said for not making it super easy to paste text to a terminal, especially from places online…
My patch to add Copy/Paste keycode support to the Cosmic Terminal was merged!
As someone who likes Rust but dislikes the look of COSMIC, are there plans to allow theming?
There are already settings to change some of the colors used.
For the terminal in particular there is an option to hide the menu bar, making it look as Foot or Alacritty do.
Holy fucking shit. I just realized that’s why Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V don’t work in Micro. This has been eye opening.
I have been trying to bind ctrl c to copy in micro and alacrity, I can’t find a way.
Always a pleasure to meet another Micro user.
weird – they work for me. ctrl+c sends SIGINT, and ctrl+v iirc isn’t treated specially. i figured sending SIGINT with kill would then preform a copy, but it doesn’t. fuck. now i have another puzzle…
xclip?
Honestly, this is a nice feature of macOS (or at least iTerm 2; I don’t use the official terminal). I know CTRL-C is used to kill processes and we all have that muscle memory but I usually try to change that on my personal Linux installs because I’ve hit it by mistake before.
I used to use CTRL+INSERT for copy and SHIFT+INSERT for paste but there’s usually no insert key on laptops or even small keyboards. It’s probably time to just adapt.
It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.
It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.
I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?
There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.
“Super” is the one modifier key that you can rely on overwriting without interfering with normal app shortcuts, so I’d personally rather prefer if applications don’t start trying to use the Super key for their own things.
I have set up Super key shortcuts for all kinds of desktop management operations, opening the launcher/terminal/browser, switching workspaces/windows, closing windows, move/resize, switch tiling mode, audio control, make my package manager install updates, switch between a set of resolutions, activate my password manager, etc.
That said, Copy/Paste is a general/global enough operation that I would not mind having Super+C/V send to the current active app the Copy/Paste keycode (I might do that actually, now that I know that there’s a code apps are starting to support!). But I think it should be the desktop environment the one configuring “Super” shortcuts, not the app.
It makes sense for each application to have their own interpretation of what does each control character (or Control shortcut) do. It’s not like all control characters have a very reliable meaning to begin with… I mean, the backspace character (Control+H) was originally meant to move a character backwards without deleting it, but most screen terminals didn’t do that. If what you mean is alternate characters from Unicode and so, then the “Alt” key would be more suitable for that. And in ISO keyboards, “AltGr” is a very common way to have combinations that insert alternate symbols.
I use Ctrl, Alt for applications, Super for the os/windowing. I hated MacOS which mixed these things. Luckily X.org let’s you do whatever you like, sometimes it’s just harder to configure. But I like it as it is.
I still use ctrl+ins and shift+ins every now and then. I’ve hit ctrl+shift+c a few times while in my browser (Vivaldi) which unfortunately is bound to “create note”. Ctrl+ins is a great workaround than using an extra neuron when in a terminal to also hit shift when copying.
⌘C and ⌘V work in the native MacOS terminal app as well.
selection autocopy and wheel/shift ins pasting is superior to all alternatives imo
I love it when I have a mouse. It’s terrible on modern touchpads though :(
fully agree. i usually sacrifice one of my less used keys and bind it as a left mouse click instead.
Centre click is a godsend though. I recently had to start using Windows again and I keep instinctively hitting it.
One of the first things I had to disable when I switched to linux lol Middle click has so many other uses in windows that made it sooo jarring. Ctrl c and crtl v are good enough for me. (Or shift in terminals)
Middle-click often works when ctrl+c/ctrl+v won’t. It’s also a separate buffer giving you the ability to have two different things copy/paste-able
That’s why we have mice copy/paste bindings on most systems too. Highlighting text auto copies, and scroll wheel click pastes. Not all do this, but many do and have for a while.
That’s a popular terminal feature, but I regularly get tripped up because my terminal has that behavior but my browser does not.
That’s what’s nice about a global solution.
in most systems this is global. it’s provided by the desktop and programs just see a copy/paste event. are you on wayland by any chance?
Yes.
yeah that’d do it. on X11 this is a solved problem, but wayland delegates the responsibility to the wm, and i don’t think anyone other than gnome has actually implemented it. another one of the paper cuts that makes it hard for me to make the switch.
I’m on Sway and I use the mouse copy and paste all day everyday.
Switch to a non-buggy browser.
There’s only two. One has broken primary selection, the other has anti-user policies against adblock plugins.
I can live without copy on highlight. But you could pry UBlock Origin from my cold, dead hands.
uBlock Origin and mouse copy and paste works perfectly well in Firefox.
Copy on select and middle mouse button paste doesn’t work in text fields created by js code in Firefox. I remember finding a stale bug report for it,
but can’t find it.There are a lot of websites that use javascript to create text fields, some recent examples that I can remember right now:
- codewars.com
- claude.ai
- vscode.dev
Edit: found report: https://github.com/codemirror/codemirror5/issues/931
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1593761
Mice? What is this thing you talk of?
Mice is animal
Mouses is computer/human interface device.
Pretty sure it’s mice for both, that’s just the correct plural for mouse, and the computer mouse literally got it’s name from the animal.
We started calling wireless mice hamsters because they got no tail.
And the second is going extinct.
Ctrl+Ins gang rise up
Wow. I haven’t seen a Sun keyboard like that in … geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.
Stop+a crew.
Back when a PROM really meant something.
You could also drop into a serious bios-style motherboard manager to really control booting and hardware configs.
I use a key remapper to give me the readline keys everywhere. Though I’ve used XKeysnail and xremap and they’re both a bit flakey, so if anyone has better recommendations that work on X11 and Wayland, I’m all ears.
There’s KMonad. Though I tried it once and found it didn’t behave quite like I expected and gave up.
I think that’s a slightly different animal. AFAIK it’s doesn’t switch config depending on the current focused window. E.g. for some programs I don’t want remapping.
Nice !! I like the ‘old new again’ effect ^^
