In GNOME Terminal you can go to the keyboard shortcut settings and rebind ctrl+C to copy and ctrl+V to paste. If you do so, then you can use Ctrl+Shift+C and Ct

In GNOME Terminal you can go to the keyboard shortcut settings and rebind ctrl+C to copy and ctrl+V to paste. If you do so, then you can use Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V to do ^C and ^V. Not quite that "selection aware" behavior, but close enough. From the terminal's point of view, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Shift+C do the same thing. The only reason you can't usually use Ctrl+Shift+C is that by default that combination is intercepted by gnome-terminal to mean "copy". (I wouldn't be surprised if other emulators with configurable keyboard shortcuts let you do a similar thing).