Wow. I haven't seen a Sun keyboard like that in .. geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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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?
Ha! Butterflies!
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.
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.
standards.xkcd
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.
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?
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.
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.
Ctrl+Ins gang rise up
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!
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.
Switch to a non-buggy browser.
Mice? What is this thing you talk of?
Mice is animal
Mouses is computer/human interface device.
And the second is going extinct.
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!
Nice !! I like the 'old new again' effect ^^
I used to have a Linux keyboard (with Tux instead of the Windows logo on super) with dedicated copy and paste keys. As far as I recall I never used them.
On old keyboards with those dedicated Copy/Paste keys, they weren’t easy to reach.
Now with programmable keyboards and layers, they can be as convenient as Control C & V.
On the software side, there were many years where they weren’t well-supported, but that’s changing now.