The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.
A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors...
And btw while apple is often offered as some golden standard for key bindings, I think the situation there is much (MUCH) worse: apps often intercept and handle common combinations on their own, with unclear precedence, which leads to non-deterministic behavior and a complete mess if you want to override any standard combination.
> And btw while apple is often offered as some golden standard for key bindings, I think the situation there is much (MUCH) worse: apps often intercept and handle common combinations on their own, with unclear precedence, which leads to non-deterministic behavior and a complete mess if you want to override any standard combination.
Thank you. That is absolutely the case. As someone who had to switch to Mac for work, I found the keybinding situation to be a complete mess. It's also incredibly hard to track down and change certain keybindings, many apps don't have any text configuration to easily modify and require you to go through their GUIs which require you to know what you are looking for (e.g., which app).
I have an interesting work around for that in my sidechat tool (https://github.com/day50-dev/sidechat/blob/main/sidechat/sid...)
It's an inversion. Instead of the user selecting and then having to figure things out, they declare an "intention to paste" and then do the selection.
In practical terms, they invoke the "use clipboard" feature then the code probes all the clipboards (tmux/primary/emacs/nvim/clipboard/secondary) and the user selects their text. One (or more) changes. That's the clipboard it's going to use.
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.
I used to think this before I got a job in a Mac-only company. I've since installed Toshy on every Linux machine I own & the difference is night & day. Having to do something extra for terminals to achieve the thing that's so simple & natural (& frequent) in GUIs just feels like terminal emulators are being treated like second class citizens among the installed apps. Having the same shortcuts "Just Work" in exactly the same way through all apps isn't just more convenient, it feels like the OS is elevating terminals to an equal tier of integration.
Which I would've really expected more Linux users would value more than they seem to.
I learned Ctrl-C for "kill program" very nearly before Ctrl-C for copy existed, and long before it existed on any platform I used. I value consistency, but I also value consistency with common practice for the type of application I'm using.
The common failure mode, for me, isn't hitting Ctrl-C for copy in a terminal by mistake, it's hitting Ctrl-Shift-C for copy in a browser and ending up with the console open, or hitting Ctrl-W to delete a word and having it close a tab.
This drives me nuts as well, the number of times I close a tab with C-W, or select all with C-A...
My brain can "switch mode" when on a regular web page, but if I open some kind of "terminal in a page" (i.e. I the AWS console), then I'm 100% it will end up with a C-W.
For me, it happens most often when I have a call open in a browser in one window, and a terminal open on the other half of the screen taking notes, and then switch to the call and start typing something in the chat.
> Which I would've really expected more Linux users would value more than they seem to.
It's likely that the users who find this annoying will simply stop using Linux.
I have the exact opposite problem on a Mac. Things don't just work. You can select text in the terminal and then middle click to paste it. But that only works in the terminal, not anywhere else.
Catches me out a bunch. There is also only a single copy buffer, so to copy from the terminal and paste into a browser I need to replace what was in my clipboard, drives me insane.
> Which I would've really expected more Linux users would value more than they seem to.
Because you get used to it and then don't think about it. I value having two copy buffers over consistency for the sake of consistency.
A clipboard manager solves all of this and doesn't break the consistency and expectation that the same shortcut copies/pastes to/from the same place.
Also Emacs keybindings. Being able to use your text editor muscle memory for editing in every text field of every native app is fantastic.
> every native app
That's a very big fineprint. With three most popular apps among developers being (I imagine) browser, jetbrains ides and vs code derivatives, all being non-native, muscle memory becomes pretty unreliable.
But yeah, would be big, if it indeed was universally supported
All day in ChromeOS at work it's accidentally open the dev tools in chrome (you Ctrl-Shift-C'd when you should have just Ctrl-C'd) or kill my server in the terminal (opposite direction). All. Day.
Same in Firefox. Absolutely infuriating and trivial for to fix with an about:config. I suppose it only affects, oh, everyone in the world who uses both dev tools and a terminal.
You can inject JS into every single page to fix it via an extension, but extensions don't have the ability to fix it otherwise. I suppose you could also intercept it in an IME?
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.
It's literraly breaking your muscle memory for one of the most commonly used shortcuts for no reason. It's a pretty big ergonomic blunder
It should be physical keys and they should be the same on every platform. I have at least 20 keys on my desktop keyboard that I never use, it’s not like the real estate isn’t there. Many older non-technical people struggle with combination keys.
If we had physical keys, we could also fairly easily add multiple clipboards like Copy+2 or Copy+F2 could be clipboard #2 without impacting the basic ease of use.
> physical keys and they should be the same on every platform.
That's an easy no, precisely because
> have at least 20 keys on my desktop keyboard that I never use
Very common operations should be ergonomic, i.e. have a convenient location. Unless you mean to make all keyboards split ergonomic with a thumb cluster, so you'd have prime space for copy and paste, adding bad 21st and 22nd key far away will be worse than a more convenient modifier
Also, you forgot laptops where there is not enough real estate to even fit the full standard desktop keyboard
(multiple clipboards would be a great benefit, though)
Lower on my priority list then separating out linguistic space from list space.
In the shell I want the super key or tab or something to mean "new list item" - no more escaping spaces (this will of course never happen in my lifetime - but if you're rebuilding technology post apocalypse with a clean slate...)
I don't even like the solution. "Buy a new programmable keyboard." The keyboard I've got generally works fine. It's not programmable as far as I know, but who knows for sure.
The clipboard has always been annoying. Even today, you often see a "copy to clipboard" or something on a web page, and it never works on Linux. Not as I've got it configured, in any case.
> A bigger UX problem (on Linux) imo is the multitude of clipboards, we have x11, vim... Those can be synchronized or not, they manifest different behaviors...
I would probably like vim's + register to always sync with the X/Wayland clipboard where possible², but it is perhaps worth pointing out that vim has (at least?¹) 28 "clipboard" slots (+, *, a-z) and this is a feature not a bug. Having accepted that, I would likewise point out that X having a clipboard and selection buffer is an intentional feature. I'd support universally supporting one single shared clipboard that everything uses properly by default, but I wouldn't want to limit the other options to do it.
¹Edit: Nope, much more than that: https://learnvim.irian.to/basics/registers
²Edit: Oh, yes, I do agree that I would be in favor of making that the default register as well so that ex. just `yy`/`p` used it.
> supporting one single shared clipboard that everything uses properly by defaul
Agree. I got to realize how convenient it is to have one shared clipboard by default after I tried (doom)emacs: behaves like vim, has registers like vim, but default register uses the clipboard. I can still use all the registers as much as I like, but the default one is global and can be shared between apps.
I now configure my vim like this.
I still miss this, however, when working occasionally without a graphical session. Perhaps there's a solution, but I haven't yet bothered to look for it.
I love the multitude of clipboards.
I love the fact I can select from the terminal, or from the GUI, and I can use Shift + Insert or middle click.
I love how I can have another clipboard using Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.
I use both on an everyday basis and has been for almost two decades.
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.
As an university level educator: This is repeatedly a major hurdle for beginners, that makes the terminal (just text) feel like a different thing than just text to them. This and the fact that you can't just select the commands you have written with the mouse or with shift arrow makes beginners go mad, seemingly for no reason. And I count myself in there, I struggled with this for more than a year. When do you paste how? When donyou copy how?
The problem when you're learning this yourself is that you won't even have the correct vocabulary to describe what you want to know, it just feels like 99% of the world works and the 1% that doesn't is the terminal.
I get that this is historical, but if we want people to understand computers betond the consumer level this is literally like Blender changing from righ-click-select to left-click-select. Back then all the pros said it is no biggie just like you, but it turns out it was a biggie, because since then popularity exploded.
We terminal nerds lose nothing if more people understand terminals, quite the opposite.
It's a pain for even experienced users. Popping open the developer tools in the browser because you've done Ctrl-Shift-C is annoying, accidentally calling a group chat of 50 people in MS Teams for the same reason is really annoying.
Oh thank God it's not just me. At least have a confirmation popup for that! Ctrl+Shift+C, Enter isn't exactly onerous for Teams power users.
Ok as much as I like keyboard shortcuts, having a shortcut for making calls is just cruel.
The ctrl-c thing isn't a big deal for me since I copy text to clipboard either using tmux (just selecting is enough) or piping the terminal screen to vim (where I've mapped it to just +)
In ideal world I'd want to have consistent copy/paste. I'm not saying it's perfect now. I'm just arguing that there are bigger UX problems IMO.
BTW, text selection in terminals seems much more annoying to me, than the necessity to press Shift when copying.
That's kind of making the perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good. We can fix the copy/paste situation now, we can't necessarily fix the bigger problems so easily.
But what is the solution? I don't see it.
Doing meta+c/v like in mac?
Thanks, no. Meta is allocated for windows manipulations in all my setups, and I'm pretty confident the approach where modifier keys are tied to specific "layers" of functionality is a more sound approach
With all kindness: Compared to mac/ios, android and linux and windows ux is death by thousand papercuts. (I’m not saying apple is perfect either, and maybe we have landed in a digital experience world that is broken for nearly everyone anyway, but I digress. :)
I am already cognitively burdened. I do not need developers telling me at what point the cumulative inconsistencies become a biggie. Copy-paste is a common action and each inconsistency I need to learn is away from my core tasks and ability to focus on those is already scarce as f.
Devs do not get to decide how central a terminal is to my workflow, and whether that terminal app deserves to have the right to tell me that it’s now a special butterfly I need to accommodate my cognition for.
But I guess Linux desktop has chosen its path of being only for tinkerers who are prepared to adopt an entire culture of quirks instead of users focusing on what’s important for them in their own lives.
I’m disappointed this still does not fix the core issue of this being broken for everyone by default.
> Devs do not get to decide
In my experience Apple devs are the _most_ opionated in terms of telling users how they should use their machine. The UI controls are super touchpad-centric, and it's crazy that a community-driven project like i3 is light years ahead to macOS "wm" features (not to talk about the native UI management). Also they decide for you where the icons to close the windows are, you want to change them? Nope, sorry, you are doing it wrong and can't move them. Your keyboard? Also wrong, you should buy an apple one, otherwise your modifiers are all messed up. You don't use the application docking bar? Well, you are doing it wrong, you can reduce it, but can't remove it, it's always going to be there at the bottom.
There are countless of instances in which the only way to do something is the Apple way, so much so that everyone who switched from Linux to Mac I have spoken with essentially concluded that either you bend to how Apple decided things should be done, or you will be constantly fighting your own machine.
I appreciate that this means that if you start with Apple and get used to their way, you have no cognitive burden on how to do something, but when you use your machine every day, you want to decide how things work to reduce your cognitive load (I.e., this is more intuitive for me this way), and Apple really doesn't like that.
> Compared to mac/ios, android and linux and windows ux is death by thousand papercuts
"What you're used to" is a major component of usability. I've had to do short stints on a macOS machine before, and find it a painful experience that I'm happy to be rid of when I'm done. People who are used to a macOS machine sometimes say the same thing about a Linux machine. They can both be right at the same time.
It isn't the only component of usability, to be clear, and it's also possible for applications to be objectively better. But familiarity and usability are often conflated.
I have home key on my external keyboard. While home in combination with any modifiers behaves consistently under Linux, it's an utter mess under macOS. Sometimes my cursor jumps to the beginning of the visual line, other times to the nearest \n before the cursor, sometimes when no text editing is involved, it scrolls the frame, other times it does nothing.
First time I tried macOS I was impressed with the globally (so I thought) respected emacs bindings (^E, ^A, and especially ^N and ^P). But then I have painfully discovered that almost every(?) app just mimics the default scheme, but essentially implements its own handling, which leads to numerous inconsistencies spreading way beyond copy/paste. That's when I realized why most macOS users I've observed use touchpad to manipulate cursor during text editing – there's no reliable universally consistent way of doing this under macOS
macOS is not just "not ideal". It's as messy as other OSes, but with its own bag of unique warts.
But I understand it's easy to ignore them once you get used to them.
I use KDE as a daily driver at work, privately run windows 12 and maintain six modern macs at my workshop. Of the bunch KDE is easily the best, with the least amount of weird unexpected behavior and the most logical, user-centric way to lay out and present system setting. Windows 11 feels like an archeogical research trip into the UI paradigms of the past every time you need to change the settings, and macOS constantly does things you didn't ask it for and disallows/breaks things you did for the past years. And there are small things like: After every software update I have to manually put shortcuts into the dock again on six computers. They make it harder and harder to run software that hasn't been approved by apple. And the small UI papercuts are easily worse than on KDE (I count here stuff that clearly didn't work as intended, not stuff I have opinions about).
> Devs do not get to decide how central a terminal is to my workflow, and whether that terminal app deserves to have the right to tell me that it’s now a special butterfly I need to accommodate my cognition for.
You must be new to computers. /s
Today's devs do not give a shit about user's needs. They just want change or profit.
I'm not sure I've seen the sci-fi movie where Apple is heralded as the golden standard of key bindings, but having used Macs for a few years in real life, I can attest the key combinations are an absolute atrocity for the reasons you mentioned and then some.
While I grew to accept some advantages of my Mac can't be easily replicated in other platforms, I think it is severely lacking in basic features, user experience and it's still occasionally infuriating even in 2025.
I do have a very long list of Mac gripes, as is probably deductable from this comment.
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie.
I don't think anything has caused me more pain with computing than this.
And I'm including dealing with Python dependencies.
While we're talking keyboards, what about emoji? Every messaging app has a different interface for them, some like Discord and Whatsapp allow you to use :smile: shortcuts, but the enumerated names are different across apps. I've occasionally gotten a dedicated OS emoji picker to show up on my Mac, but I don't know how.
On Ubuntu Cinnamon, I managed to create keyboard shortcuts for the 8 or so emoji I use the most by binding something called a "compose" key and modifying a .XCompose file, but it still took other config file gymnastics to make it persist between X sessions.
Control + Command + Space
Crazy, thanks!
I use ctrl-Ins/shift-Ins and it works in my terminals and in the browser. I've not checked if it works in other apps because ctrl-c/ctrl-v always work in other apps. I'd be happy if ctrl-Ins/shift-Ins just always worked; I don't need innovation here.
Innovation would be to actually have that key on most laptop keyboards.
I think Apple did the right thing by keeping GUI shortcuts separate from terminal control codes.
I never understood why the Linux GUI world ran blindly after Windows and emulated every pattern, good or bad. And yes, I know that Ctrl-C/Ctrl-P for Copy/Paste are much older and came out of IBM's CUA and SAA initiatives. What matters is that with the Mac we had a clear role model how to handle this aspect of GUI cleanly but me missed it.
While we’re at it, I’m still on the lookout for IBM’s original SAA and CUA documentation. If anyone has these lying around, I’d be interested
Probably because of Miguel and his fascination with windows.
I used stty to make interrupt ktrl-k, then configured the terminal app to make copy/paste ctrl-c/ctrl-v.
I use copy/paste more than I use interrupt.
I hated MacOS keyboard shortcuts at first, but cmd-c/cmd-v do work around this problem.
Lovely. Do you have some tips for that? Something you put in bashrc?
I just remap my terminal to have Ctrl-X to send SIGHUP, and Ctrl-C to copy. X looks more like a kill to me anyways.
I like how Apple introduced the CMD key, with copy/paste linked to it in the terminal, leaving CTRL to work as intended. Even outside the terminal basic emacs key binding work as intended, such as c-k c-u etc
That's an arrangement I also really appreciate. But the origins are different from what most might assume.
Apple introduced copy and paste in 1983 using the command key. Microsoft later copied the idea using the control key because PCs lacked a command key [1].
X had super, meta, hyper keys before the PC's stunted set of modifiers became a standard [2]. Microsoft and the PC are rarely the origins of things, mainly because CP/M, DOS and later Windows were poor, amateurish, and incomplete copies of other systems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut,_copy,_and_paste
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)
I use Toshy along with an Apple keyboard to work around Linux distros' unfortunate Windowsiness here but I really really wish someone would release a fully fledged distro or DE put together with Apple keyboards in mind.
There's a lot of things about Apple I dislike but it's clear Microsoft's overloading of Ctrl for GUI shortcuts was a move made with complete disregard for terminal users, & one that's resulted in decades of pain for anyone regularly switching between GUI & terminal contexts, & I have to give it to Apple that Cmd was clearly designed to respect, retain & augment optimal terminal use.
OTOH, Microsoft's introduction of "menu accelerators" (Alt+*) is an incredible productivity booster (which luckily most Linux graphical toolkits have adopted).
I got to appreciate it only after I had to use macOS at work.
Somehow I got used to Ctrl workarounds in terminal emulators (just add shift). But the lack of accelerators bugs me immensely.
I've always found menu accelerators odd.
I find them a little too dependent on individual app developers word choices to have any kind of consistency across apps I use, plus I tend not to use menus for anything other than infrequent settings changes. Given that they haven't seemed substantially different to macos displaying annotations for bound shortcuts within the menus.
(admittedly I use mac in work & my personal computers at home have all been Linux since my Windows 2003 workstation died, so my knowledge of modern windows apps & their attached accelerators is rusty & I'm probably biased here)
The last windows I used was XP. But accelerators do work in Linux.
And they are not just about menus: in any modal window I can do Alt+O for Ok. And this paradigm allows discoverability, I don't need to memorize shortcuts, I just hold Alt and look for underscored letters – that's how GUI should be IMO.
It's not perfect, and if I were designing UI from scratch, I'd made this feature modal instead of allocating entire physical key for that (like they do hints in vim-like browsers).
Non-Mac keyboards have a meta / “Windows” key as well, usually sitting there doing nothing.
On Linux it is often already used for window manager specific shortcuts.
They are the most common modifier key for tiling window managers. It's very likely one of the most often pressed key in my setup.
In Emacs if CUA mode is on, C-c behaves as copy if any text is selected (and if no other keys have been pressed within a short time). To send a C-c when text is selected you do a C-S-c instead. Similarly in Windows Terminal I remember C-c works as copy without any issue (it deselects the text with the first C-c IIRC, so if you do two C-c's with text selected you copy and then send an interrupt).
Do any linux terminals implement anything like this? Why resort to adding new keys to keyboards?
Much easier would be to have all apps treat C-S-C as copy and C-S-V as paste like the terminal does. In Chrome this starts the inspector. I changed jobs and went from a Mac to Linux and muscle memory keeps tripping me.
Hopefully not UI designer!
> To trigger the copy or paste keyboard actions, software has to bind these key codes to actions. Software toolkits or apps themselves are responsible for this.
If only the universal subset of communication maintained by the OS were actual actions
We gonna get support for keys that don't exist on any modern keyboards, don't worry though you can remap them or bind them to change mplicated macro layers in your expensive mechanical keyboards.
Do all that and you won't need those two lines of xinit.rc
Has no one noticed that ctrl-Ins/shift-Ins are almost universal, and they work in Windows and on Linux?
Ins just doesn't exist on a lot of laptop keyboards, which kind of limits adoption.
Been a linux user since 2016 when I found an Ubuntu 16 installation CD in a drawer wirh old books. The thing for me is having ctrl+v paste without formatting. (If I need to retain formatting, I will gladly do ctrl+shift+v)
Maybe it's just me but, I'd gladly scroll endlessly looking at pictures of old keyboards / HID devices. (I use a Fellows KU-9938 Split Keyboard and a Kensignton)
ctrl/shift-insert?
With many laptop vendors placing the insert key in the least ergonomic location or on FN later, it's not really an option, unfortunately
Rite? But no, apparently you and I are the only ones who know this.
Not enough people know that you can just select text then middle click somewhere to paste it. No keys required and yes it works with all terminal emulators I've tried. This has been default behaviour on Linux desktops for as long as I've used it (decades).
Wouldn't it be darn nice, though, if there was a universal mechanism for apps to announce which shortcut they have available and a centralized way to configure them all?
For example, I was able to assign copy/paste keys to the corresponding actions in the GTK keybindings, and it worked like charm, except in Chrome. That is, in Chrome, web content respected these keybindings, but the browser UI didn't. So I could use the keys on textareas and inputs all I wanted, but paste into the address bar? Nooooo, BECAUSE FUCKING CHROME HAS THEM HARDCODED per platform!
(However, in Firefox it worked just fine across the whole UI.)
“The Year of the Linux Desktop” will be when copy/pasted is solved.