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
sigh can’t believe that no one mentioned that there is a default set of shortcuts that are used across all GNU programs, and it’s been the default since way before Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V existed. You can easily copy/paste stuff in any terminal using the same keypresses you would on Emacs, I.e. Ctrl+space to start selection, Alt+W to copy and Ctrl+Y to paste. In fact you can navigate the entire line the same way, not just copy/pasting but moving back and forward, selecting and deleting stuff, e.g. Ctrl+A Ctrl+K cuts the entire line.
Unless you activate Vi mode (which most terminals support) and then you can use the same keypresses you would on Vi, including
ci"and other cool stuff that’s much more powerful that simple copy/paste.There is a default, it’s just not the same as word uses.
You describing a kill ring which is internal to the shell and not synced to the system clipboard. Nor does it work in GUI apps.
The benefit of universal bindings is not have to learn one method for GUI apps, another for terminals and a third for shells implementing the kill-ring like bindings.
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?
you’re evil. i love it.
“Ed is the standard text editor.”
Ha! Butterflies!
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.
Sun keyboards had dedicated copy and paste keys.
Also the illusive “Stop” key that you needed to break into the boot rom.
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.
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.
We could use Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert like in the last three decades, but some of these keyboards apparently forgot about the Insert key.
Well yeah but shift insert is annoying as hell since the keys are so far apart
I confirmed that these already supported a number of terminals plus QT and GTK. They could also be mapped to be more ergonomic with a programmable keyboard:
- Control+Insert: Copy
- Shift+Delete: Cut
- Shift+Insert: Paste
But Shift+insert currently pastes the primary selection, not the copy-paste clipboard. So it doesn’t do the same as Ctrl+V.
It depends. In Firefox, Chrome and LibreOffice, Shift-Insert pastes the clipboard, not the selection. Viva Linux!
what about shift+insert amd ctrl+insert thats literally already there
Because lots of people don’t have an insert key?
Well, the article proposes to use dedicated copy and paste keys. If you don’t have an insert key, you probably don’t have those either.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
⌘C and ⌘V work in the native MacOS terminal app as well.
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.
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.
“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 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.
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…
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?
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.
Ctrl+Ins gang rise up
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
Nice !! I like the ‘old new again’ effect ^^
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 don’t want copy paste buttons support, I want the caps lock delay to be fixed. Yes, I use the caps lock not shift, as my brain can’t get used to using shift for caps. I’m so tired of typing like THis all the time. 😂 (I’m using a hack currently that helps, but it would be nice if it gets fixed on Linux in general).
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.
