4 ms·
A lot of things are different without being better. Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early W
by beagle3 6y ago
A lot of things are different without being better.
Before ctrl-x/Ctrl-v became the standard for Cut/paste, it was Ctrl-del/Ctrl-insert in many dos and early Windows editors - which makes a lot more mnemonic sense.
It’s better to standardize on something, but that something isn’t necessarily better and is often worse.
- Jtsummers 6y agoC-x and C-c make some sense as cut and copy. But C-v, C-z, C-y as paste, undo, and redo just make little sense. The first two make sense for their proximity to x and c in the QWERTY layout. y only makes sense if it happened to be unassigned. Keyboard shortcuts will always fall into one of two categories: That makes perfect sense (usually mapping to a mnemonic like C-a for "select all"); That's totally arbitrary (C-y). It makes sense (and cua-mode offers it) to offer the opportunity to rebind the keys to the mainstream arbitrarily selected shortcuts, but it also makes sense to keep what's been used by emacs users for 40 years since that's what they're used to at this point (oh hell, I've been using it for 20 years, time has flown).
- robocat 6y agoMnemonic keyboard shortcuts must be a bastard to learn if you don’t speak English. And shortcuts based on finger distance must suck for anyone using a non-qwerty keyboard (especially a non-latin character based language!).
- Jtsummers 6y agoIndeed. I use the Dvorak layout (a choice I made twenty years ago and have stuck with since my typing speed did improve, by virtue of finally learning to touch type properly), and many shortcuts make no sense. On the other hand, I actually found emacs much more comfortable to use.
- liability 6y agoThe P and V operations on semaphores are from Dutch. I find this difficult, "The V kind of looks like a down arrow.. but wait no that's increment. The P could mean plus.. wait no that's decrement..."
- mjw1007 6y agoA third category is those chosen for their physical position.
- badsectoracula 6y agoNote that redo is often ctrl+shift+z which is much easier to type. However redo is a weird case because traditionally most GUI applications (at least on Windows) didn't have explicit redo even until late 90s/early 2000s and redo was just undo a second time (ie. undo was just a flip between the last and previous state). When applications started to add an undo stack and redo command there wasn't a commonly accepted shortcut key for it so they used whatever made sense for the developers - which is how ctrl+y (previous to letter z) and ctrl+shift+z (in Windows shift often inverts the action, e.g. alt+tab vs alt+shift+tab) came to be (though those weren't the only ones).
- twoodfin 6y agoThose might make more sense, but even if my MacBook had Insert & Del keys, I doubt I could Ctrl- them with one hand.
- badsectoracula 6y agoFWIW it was Shift+Del for Cut, Shift+Insert for Paste and Ctrl+Insert for Copy and AFAIK that came from IBM's CUA. Also these shortcuts are still supported by Windows (and personally while i use Ctrl+X and Ctrl+C for Cut and Copy, i tend to use Shift+Insert for Paste :-P).
- barrkel 6y agoCtrl+Ins for copy, Shift+Del for cut and Shift+Ins for paste. Still works in Windows. Ctrl+Del deletes a word. DOS editors often used WordStar bindings. C-k C-b to start a block, C-k C-c to copy or C-k C-v to move. Turbo Pascal used these bindings. They're also the default bindings for the `joe` editor.
- a_e_k 6y agoAnd Ctrl+Ins, Shift+Del, Shift+Ins work out of the box in (windowed) Emacs, too.
- x87678r 6y agoctrl x/c/v is best because you can do it with your left hand while your right hand is using the mouse.
- chrisseaton 6y agoYes! Exactly!