Ctrl-X/C/V were originally Macintosh (and maybe Xerox before that?) and then were adopted by Windows in the 3.1 era so Word for Windows would match up better with Word for Mac. But PC not having a Command key, and the Windows key not being a thing yet, they were applied to Control instead. Which of course overlapped with the other major use of Ctrl-C as "interrupt" starting back into early UNIX machines (and adopted by DOS) but... being a graphical environment they apparently didn't consider that important at the time.
Yes, the cut/copy/paste system and its shortcuts were developed at the Xerox PARC LRG as part of Smalltalk-76. They used a Control key.
>and adopted by DOS
DOS inherited it from CP/M by way of the 86-DOS clone that Gates purchased. Kildall used the TOPS-10 while developing PL/M and CP/M and adopted some of its conventions, including control-break.
Historically, of course, copy and paste on a Unix machine was a mouse thing and followed X11 conventions. You selected text with the left mouse button — automatically be saved to the primary clipboard just by virtue of being selected, no key press needed — and the middle mouse button pasted it at the location you clicked.
This is somewhat different to having the two part motion/action of select/control-C and click/control-V. It’s boiled down to just select and middle-click. Separately, you can often use shift-Insert to paste the primary buffer.
Maybe everyone has known this forever and I'm the last to find out, but I thought I'd share as it was a revelation. I middle click all the time when using a mouse, so it was nice to finally discover a replacement while using the trackpad.
Alternatively, though I don't know if it works on Mac, on X11 Linux you can middle click with touchpads by tapping with 2 fingers. Tapping with 3 fingers right clicks. That's going to work anywhere clicking does, because it's handled by the touchpad driver rather than by app convention. If it doesn't work by default, it can be configured with `synclient`.
Ctrl-C doing different things come from different os/software lineages
"far more natural" would be if you moved pinky up or down. Sideways movements are only natural for your thumb
It's not bad if you have a keyboard (e.g. topre) with control in the caps-lock position (or remap it, which I usually do).
And I also agree that the Lisa/Mac-style command-[zxcv] works really well (particularly if you use a mouse with your right hand.)
MacOS has no problem with both control-c (break) and command-c (copy) - why isn't this common in Linux as well (at least for keyboards with a command or windows key, which seems to be many, many keyboards.)
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxcj3ll/a/magic-keyboard-...
I see on that Apple keyboard:
• two control keys
• two option keys
• two command keys
• delete (aka backspace)
• forward delete (aka delete)
• home
• end
• page up
• page down
Ctrl-C dumb double function can also be fixed, use it to copy everywhere universally (use a better terminal with an override) and rebind cancel
> who decided that ctrl-c should be used for both copy and abort???
As usual in most of these cases, there wasn't really a single decision, just some historical artifact no one had the care to think about and fix, so it lingers in defaults
Maybe you could use thumb+Escape for Ctrl+C?
Or thumb+X is simpler - you can't cut anything in the terminal, so "cutting" the current process is a convenient combo and even has some mnemonic potential
You could also have +C copy when text is selected and break otherwise, though that modality can be a bit confusing / error-prone for some
Toshy can help but it's still not a perfect fix.
First claim has no priority over better claim. Designs can and should improve
Not being able to cut/paste easily because every tool used the Control key for something different, especially in the terminal, was infuriating.
Having the command key handle these kinds of GUI-focused interactions, and Control for most of the terminal-centric and text manipulation (Ctrl-A/E for beginning/end of line, from Emacs) makes the system great to work with.
I didn't mind anything else about my foray into Linux as a desktop OS. If we could get a Linux GUI distro that all it did was match the Mac command key paradigm, I think it would make a lot of people happy.
As a sibling comment notes, Caps Lock as Control helps a lot but it's still not as nice as Command-based shortcuts, both in hand positioning and in terms of shortcut overlap.
No, you’re not. That’s why I tend to use the archaic shift-Ins and control-Ins shortcuts for copy and paste on Windows. I feel like a dinosaur every time.
On Linux I just deal with it and curse a lot.
As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.
Gee thanks.
I like to have my right hand on a mouse or trackpad, so two handed chords are much less convenient.
Macs manage to make one-handed chords for copy and paste ergonomic, but on a PC it's user error?
Cmd-C is not any more ergonomic than Ctrl-C. You are only speaking from position of habit. Pressing modifier with tucked in thumb is not great for it.
If someone is concerned about ergonomics, they should buy ergonomic keyboard. Standard layouts are crap.
Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.