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.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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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?
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?
No, only vi
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ha! Butterflies!
Wow. I haven't seen a Sun keyboard like that in .. geez forever. Whose were fun times. I was younger then.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Ctrl+Ins gang rise up
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.
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!
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!
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.