I think the simple answer is: - Ctrl-C was first, existing before GUIs had been invented. - Ctrl-C isn't really a terminal thing. There are things you can pre

I think the simple answer is: - Ctrl-C was first, existing before GUIs had been invented. - Ctrl-C isn't really a terminal thing. There are things you can press on a keyboard the terminal will interpret, but it passes Ctrl-C through. - Things that run in terminals rely on this. It's an easy way to send SIGINT. - GUIs came onto the scene, and in Windows Ctrl-C/X/V was copy/cut/paste. - People built terminal emulators (xterm) for UNIX GUIs, and didn't have this conflict because they didn't use Ctrl-C/X/V for copy/cut/paste. - Slowly UNIX terminal emulators and Windows GUI standards started to occupy the same space (GNOME, KDE, WSL), which led to this conflict. So your perspective of Ctrl-C/X/V = copy/cut/paste is expected behavior isn't incorrect, but it's also not incorrect that many (more?) people expect Ctrl-C to send SIGINT in a terminal. You're experiencing the conflict that everyone else is, you'd just make concessions in a different way. To that end, this is configurable in many terminals: Konsole [0], Gnome Terminal [1], xterm [2], URxvt [3]. [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/quirya/how_to_use_ctrlc_to_copy_in_konsole/ https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/quirya/how_to_use_ctrl... [1]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/53688/making-ctrlc-copy-text-in-gnome-terminal https://askubuntu.com/questions/53688/making-ctrlc-copy-text... [2]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/339160/enable-ctrlc-for-copy-and-ctrlshiftc-for-interrupt https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/339160/enable-ctrlc... [3]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39884093/rebinding-copy-paste-in-urxvt https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39884093/rebinding-copy-...