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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 mult

by koiueo 1y ago

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.

echelon 1y ago
> 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.
yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> 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 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.
- koiueo 1y ago
  > 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.
  - NDxTreme 1y ago
    It should be included in the :OS section, the tty defaults. From the docs. "This module configures Emacs for use in the terminal, by providing: System clipboard integration (through an external clipboard program or OSC-52 escape codes in supported terminals). Cursor-shape changing across evil states (requires a terminal that supports it). Mouse support in the terminal."
- xigoi 1y ago
  > 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. set clipboard=unnamedplus I deliberately do not use this beause I don’t want random Vim edits to clobber my system clipboard.
  - opan 1y ago
    Agreed. I am completely okay with the separate clipboards. Allows stuff like cc or dd followed by pasting in from the system clipboard (different text) without having to go re-copy something because you just overwrote it. I used spacemacs for a while and I absolutely hated the clipboard syncing.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      Well, vim has an absurdly large number of registers. You could just do ex. "add"+p (that is, "delete this line into register a, then paste from +")
savolai 1y ago
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.
- atoav 1y ago
  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).
  - atoav 1y ago
    Correction: Windows 11, that was a typo, sorry.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > 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.
atoav 1y ago
> 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.
- sam_bristow 1y ago
  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.
  - PhilipRoman 1y ago
    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 +)
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    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.
- koiueo 1y ago
incompatible 1y ago
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.
- lucumo 1y ago
  > 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. That's weird. It's a pretty widely available Javascript API for years already. Nothing OS specific on the website's side. Are you running an ancient/fringe browser? https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_clipboard_writetext https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_clipboard_writetext
  - db48x 1y ago
    Sure, but the API is primitive and limited. The browser puts it in CLIPBOARD, but then the user pastes from PRIMARY and gets something they didn’t expect. And the author of the web page probably included some event handler(s) that breaks the selection, so that selecting text doesn’t copy to PRIMARY like it should either.
    - incompatible 1y ago
      I suppose something like that is going on. Perhaps if I use some kind of "clipboard app" I'll be able to recover it. Edit: Hmm, got one already called clipman, and it can display the two types of selections, now just have to figure out how to use it.
- account42 1y ago
  With X11 you don't even need a programmable keyboard for this, just make your own xkb layout. These support multiple layers just fine.
lucideer 1y ago
> 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.
- doix 1y ago
  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.
  - pinoy420 1y ago
    Command c command v works fine for me because I don’t “optimise” my experience. It’s a fun game to do I guess but if you become “more productive” by having a slightly quicker mechanism to find a file through 9 different chords on your terminal only interface - you likely aren’t solving problems that are worthwhile.
    - doix 1y ago
      I've heard this opinion worded slightly different many, many times over the years. I just can't agree with it. You're going to spend thousands of hours infront of a computer, it makes sense to invest time in being "efficient". You reach a point of diminishing returns with everything. You can only gain so much knowledge/intelligence/experience before every increase in that becomes extremely difficult. Trying to become "smarter" when you are already "smart" is much harder than getting easy efficiency wins. There are people that take it to the extreme of course, where they spend all their time on extremely tiny efficiency wins instead of learning how to program, but that's the same problem in reverse. It's a pretty old concept, the first time I've seen it given a proper name was "aggregation of marginal gains" [0]. [0] https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains
eviks 1y ago
> 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
- klabb3 1y ago
  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.
  - eviks 1y ago
    > 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)
    - klabb3 1y ago
      Status quo bias? First we have a large caps lock key and two alt keys. And we even have a ”Windows key” (probably soon an annoying AI key?). Many languages have additional keys, even on laptops (eg Swedish keyboards have å, ä and ö in addition to English ascii) so the real estate argument feels surmountable. Muscle memory and having to retrain is the real issue - you only want big changes like that at most once per decade or two. > adding bad 21st and 22nd key far away will be worse than a more convenient modifier Even if in the scroll lock/pause-break region it would help a lot for those who struggle with modifier keys. With this option you could keep Ctrl+C/V.
audiodude 1y ago
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.
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Same in Firefox. Absolutely infuriating and trivial for them to fix/disable with an about:config even if you absolutely had to keep Ctrl-Shift-C for the masses. I suppose it only affects, oh, everyone in the world who uses both dev tools and a terminal. Which is almost a complete intersection with people who use dev tools! Or have they always been expecting AI to take over web design entirely and you no longer need terminals or something? 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?
magic_hamster 1y ago
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.
Wilder7977 1y ago
> 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).
- troupo 1y ago
  > I found the keybinding situation to be a complete mess. As in: most shortcts work the same across all apps? > 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 Any action exposed in menus is handled on OS level in keyboard configuration: https://techtoro.io/blog/how-to-change-keyboard-shortcuts-on-a-mac/ https://techtoro.io/blog/how-to-change-keyboard-shortcuts-on...
  - Wilder7977 1y ago
    No, I mean keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu. Case in point, iterm2. Tons of useless keybindings that you have no easy way to see and disable. Let alone the fact that the app immediately crashes every time I try to modify one. You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts?
    - troupo 1y ago
      > keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu Isn't it the same issue across all operating systems then? > You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts? You wouldn't believe how many times I've ran into people who said something and it turns out they didn't do something that would fix their issues :)
johnisgood 1y ago
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.
- zajio1am 1y ago
  I like having bot selection and clipboard, but problem is consistency. In terminal (rxvt) shift-ins pastes selection, while in GTK app, the same shortcut pastes clipboard.
  - johnisgood 1y ago
    I have not had this issue. Are you sure that everything is configured properly?
kristopolous 1y ago
I have an interesting work around for that in my sidechat tool (https://github.com/day50-dev/sidechat/blob/main/sidechat/sidechat#L242 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.
cycomanic 1y ago
I almost exclusively use middle click paste when dealing with the terminal (and most other things as I find it much more convenient). That actually has become more annoying recently, because it seems to work very inconsistently in browsers now. Somehow some websites (e.g. The code blocks in webui, GitHub...) seem to not use the regular clipboard selection so pasting from that doesn't work (I hadnt had time to really investigate)
AlecSchueler 1y ago
> 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 It's funny though because I'm so used to it I actually have it as part of my workflow and use the different clipboards differently. If I have to use a non-Linux machine for a while I suddenly feel crippled by only having the one.
GTP 1y ago
I also think on Linux it's just a matter of pressing shift in terminals, but I also ended up opening an unwanted developer tools window in Firefox countless times while copying strings between the browser and the terminal due to ending up using the shift inside Firefox as well. Not a dealbreaker, but annoying.
- lucketone 1y ago
  Ctrl ins/shit ins. (Not the home row, but no accidents with it)
  - ArtRichards 1y ago
    came here to post this, but it shares a different clipboard than ctrl+c/v or something?? anyone know the differences?
zvr 1y ago
An important lesson to learn is the way X11 does copy/paste (hint: it doesn't). You select (typically via the mouse) something on the screen. The client (the software that handles this, e.g.terminal emulator, browser, office editing suite) declares ownership on a "selection". There are at least 3 of them: PRIMARY, SECONDARY, and CLIPBOARD. Nothing gets copied! When you go to some other client (or even the same) and do a "paste", a request is sent to the first client (the selection owner), "please give me the content". The second client gets the content and does whatever it wants with it, typically inserting it somewhere. Contrast this way of operation to what other systems (like Windows and Mac) do: the content is copied to a central place, and then copied out to be "pasted". If one wants this behavior in X11, one needs to run something like a "clipboard manager" which can trivially implement this. I must admit, when using Windows, instead of Ctrl-V for pasting, I have completely switched to Windows-V, which gives you at least a history of the copied content. Going further, on X11, the additional wonderful part is that there are also content-negotiation primitives built-in in this exchange! So it could be the case that you select some formatted text in your browser, you want to paste it in your text editor (e.g. gvim), the editor asks ("give me the content, in Markdown (or HTML) format") and this is what gets transferred and eventually inserted. Or, if you select an image, you can paste the SVG text that generated it. I have no idea what Wayland does, but this is another functionality that is extremely helpful and will be missed if not available, when/if X11 is replaced.
- account42 1y ago
  > Contrast this way of operation to what other systems (like Windows and Mac) do: the content is copied to a central place, and then copied out to be "pasted". This is a gross oversimplification to how Windows manages the clipboard. In the general case, the situation is not much different from X11 and the data stays in the sending application until requested - and is lost on program exit.
  - zvr 1y ago
    Really? That doesn't match my experience. I've just tried: Open Notepad; write something, select and copy it. Exit Notepad. Open browser. Paste. What was written in Notepad gets pasted.
graemep 1y ago
My biggest annoyance by far is that select on multiple browsers location bar does let you middle click paste the selection. You have to copy and paste.
zajio1am 1y ago
> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie. You have to know what to add. Sometimes it is shift, sometimes (rxvt) it is alt.
zahlman 1y ago
> 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... It occurs to me that if there were a universal copy/paste key, then it could be implemented by the OS rather than the applications, such that it uses a single clipboard (or chooses the appropriate one by application type, or even by user choice!) and sends an event (maybe as a signal?) to programs rather than having them scan. Which in turn would make it possible to remove the ability to scan, and thus the ability to have situations like that recent one with StarDict.

by koiueo 1y ago

echelon 1y ago

> 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.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago

> 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 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.

koiueo 1y ago
> 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.
- NDxTreme 1y ago
  It should be included in the :OS section, the tty defaults. From the docs. "This module configures Emacs for use in the terminal, by providing: System clipboard integration (through an external clipboard program or OSC-52 escape codes in supported terminals). Cursor-shape changing across evil states (requires a terminal that supports it). Mouse support in the terminal."
xigoi 1y ago
> 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. set clipboard=unnamedplus I deliberately do not use this beause I don’t want random Vim edits to clobber my system clipboard.
- opan 1y ago
  Agreed. I am completely okay with the separate clipboards. Allows stuff like cc or dd followed by pasting in from the system clipboard (different text) without having to go re-copy something because you just overwrote it. I used spacemacs for a while and I absolutely hated the clipboard syncing.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    Well, vim has an absurdly large number of registers. You could just do ex. "add"+p (that is, "delete this line into register a, then paste from +")

savolai 1y ago

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.

atoav 1y ago
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).
- atoav 1y ago
  Correction: Windows 11, that was a typo, sorry.
hulitu 1y ago
> 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.

atoav 1y ago

> 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.

sam_bristow 1y ago
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.
- PhilipRoman 1y ago
  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 +)
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  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.
koiueo 1y ago

incompatible 1y ago

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.

lucumo 1y ago
> 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. That's weird. It's a pretty widely available Javascript API for years already. Nothing OS specific on the website's side. Are you running an ancient/fringe browser? https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_clipboard_writetext https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_clipboard_writetext
- db48x 1y ago
  Sure, but the API is primitive and limited. The browser puts it in CLIPBOARD, but then the user pastes from PRIMARY and gets something they didn’t expect. And the author of the web page probably included some event handler(s) that breaks the selection, so that selecting text doesn’t copy to PRIMARY like it should either.
  - incompatible 1y ago
    I suppose something like that is going on. Perhaps if I use some kind of "clipboard app" I'll be able to recover it. Edit: Hmm, got one already called clipman, and it can display the two types of selections, now just have to figure out how to use it.
account42 1y ago
With X11 you don't even need a programmable keyboard for this, just make your own xkb layout. These support multiple layers just fine.

lucideer 1y ago

> 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.

doix 1y ago
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.
- pinoy420 1y ago
  Command c command v works fine for me because I don’t “optimise” my experience. It’s a fun game to do I guess but if you become “more productive” by having a slightly quicker mechanism to find a file through 9 different chords on your terminal only interface - you likely aren’t solving problems that are worthwhile.
  - doix 1y ago
    I've heard this opinion worded slightly different many, many times over the years. I just can't agree with it. You're going to spend thousands of hours infront of a computer, it makes sense to invest time in being "efficient". You reach a point of diminishing returns with everything. You can only gain so much knowledge/intelligence/experience before every increase in that becomes extremely difficult. Trying to become "smarter" when you are already "smart" is much harder than getting easy efficiency wins. There are people that take it to the extreme of course, where they spend all their time on extremely tiny efficiency wins instead of learning how to program, but that's the same problem in reverse. It's a pretty old concept, the first time I've seen it given a proper name was "aggregation of marginal gains" [0]. [0] https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains

eviks 1y ago

> 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

klabb3 1y ago
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.
- eviks 1y ago
  > 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)
  - klabb3 1y ago
    Status quo bias? First we have a large caps lock key and two alt keys. And we even have a ”Windows key” (probably soon an annoying AI key?). Many languages have additional keys, even on laptops (eg Swedish keyboards have å, ä and ö in addition to English ascii) so the real estate argument feels surmountable. Muscle memory and having to retrain is the real issue - you only want big changes like that at most once per decade or two. > adding bad 21st and 22nd key far away will be worse than a more convenient modifier Even if in the scroll lock/pause-break region it would help a lot for those who struggle with modifier keys. With this option you could keep Ctrl+C/V.

audiodude 1y ago

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.

grues-dinner 1y ago
Same in Firefox. Absolutely infuriating and trivial for them to fix/disable with an about:config even if you absolutely had to keep Ctrl-Shift-C for the masses. I suppose it only affects, oh, everyone in the world who uses both dev tools and a terminal. Which is almost a complete intersection with people who use dev tools! Or have they always been expecting AI to take over web design entirely and you no longer need terminals or something? 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?

magic_hamster 1y ago

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.

Wilder7977 1y ago

> 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).

troupo 1y ago
> I found the keybinding situation to be a complete mess. As in: most shortcts work the same across all apps? > 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 Any action exposed in menus is handled on OS level in keyboard configuration: https://techtoro.io/blog/how-to-change-keyboard-shortcuts-on-a-mac/ https://techtoro.io/blog/how-to-change-keyboard-shortcuts-on...
- Wilder7977 1y ago
  No, I mean keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu. Case in point, iterm2. Tons of useless keybindings that you have no easy way to see and disable. Let alone the fact that the app immediately crashes every time I try to modify one. You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts?
  - troupo 1y ago
    > keybindings that are app specific and that are _not_ exposed in the keyboard configuration menu Isn't it the same issue across all operating systems then? > You really assumed I haven't searched - and figured out - how to change keyboard shortcuts? You wouldn't believe how many times I've ran into people who said something and it turns out they didn't do something that would fix their issues :)

johnisgood 1y ago

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.

zajio1am 1y ago
I like having bot selection and clipboard, but problem is consistency. In terminal (rxvt) shift-ins pastes selection, while in GTK app, the same shortcut pastes clipboard.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  I have not had this issue. Are you sure that everything is configured properly?

kristopolous 1y ago

I have an interesting work around for that in my sidechat tool (https://github.com/day50-dev/sidechat/blob/main/sidechat/sidechat#L242 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.

cycomanic 1y ago

I almost exclusively use middle click paste when dealing with the terminal (and most other things as I find it much more convenient). That actually has become more annoying recently, because it seems to work very inconsistently in browsers now. Somehow some websites (e.g. The code blocks in webui, GitHub...) seem to not use the regular clipboard selection so pasting from that doesn't work (I hadnt had time to really investigate)

AlecSchueler 1y ago

> 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 It's funny though because I'm so used to it I actually have it as part of my workflow and use the different clipboards differently. If I have to use a non-Linux machine for a while I suddenly feel crippled by only having the one.

GTP 1y ago

I also think on Linux it's just a matter of pressing shift in terminals, but I also ended up opening an unwanted developer tools window in Firefox countless times while copying strings between the browser and the terminal due to ending up using the shift inside Firefox as well. Not a dealbreaker, but annoying.

lucketone 1y ago
Ctrl ins/shit ins. (Not the home row, but no accidents with it)
- ArtRichards 1y ago
  came here to post this, but it shares a different clipboard than ctrl+c/v or something?? anyone know the differences?

zvr 1y ago

An important lesson to learn is the way X11 does copy/paste (hint: it doesn't). You select (typically via the mouse) something on the screen. The client (the software that handles this, e.g.terminal emulator, browser, office editing suite) declares ownership on a "selection". There are at least 3 of them: PRIMARY, SECONDARY, and CLIPBOARD. Nothing gets copied! When you go to some other client (or even the same) and do a "paste", a request is sent to the first client (the selection owner), "please give me the content". The second client gets the content and does whatever it wants with it, typically inserting it somewhere. Contrast this way of operation to what other systems (like Windows and Mac) do: the content is copied to a central place, and then copied out to be "pasted". If one wants this behavior in X11, one needs to run something like a "clipboard manager" which can trivially implement this. I must admit, when using Windows, instead of Ctrl-V for pasting, I have completely switched to Windows-V, which gives you at least a history of the copied content. Going further, on X11, the additional wonderful part is that there are also content-negotiation primitives built-in in this exchange! So it could be the case that you select some formatted text in your browser, you want to paste it in your text editor (e.g. gvim), the editor asks ("give me the content, in Markdown (or HTML) format") and this is what gets transferred and eventually inserted. Or, if you select an image, you can paste the SVG text that generated it. I have no idea what Wayland does, but this is another functionality that is extremely helpful and will be missed if not available, when/if X11 is replaced.

account42 1y ago
> Contrast this way of operation to what other systems (like Windows and Mac) do: the content is copied to a central place, and then copied out to be "pasted". This is a gross oversimplification to how Windows manages the clipboard. In the general case, the situation is not much different from X11 and the data stays in the sending application until requested - and is lost on program exit.
- zvr 1y ago
  Really? That doesn't match my experience. I've just tried: Open Notepad; write something, select and copy it. Exit Notepad. Open browser. Paste. What was written in Notepad gets pasted.

graemep 1y ago

My biggest annoyance by far is that select on multiple browsers location bar does let you middle click paste the selection. You have to copy and paste.

zajio1am 1y ago

> The universality of copy/paste is overrated. It's literally just adding shift in terminal emulators, no biggie. You have to know what to add. Sometimes it is shift, sometimes (rxvt) it is alt.

zahlman 1y ago

> 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... It occurs to me that if there were a universal copy/paste key, then it could be implemented by the OS rather than the applications, such that it uses a single clipboard (or chooses the appropriate one by application type, or even by user choice!) and sends an event (maybe as a signal?) to programs rather than having them scan. Which in turn would make it possible to remove the ability to scan, and thus the ability to have situations like that recent one with StarDict.