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> 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 repe

by 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
In ideal world I'd want to have consistent copy/paste. I'm not saying it's perfect now. I'm just arguing that there are bigger UX problems IMO. BTW, text selection in terminals seems much more annoying to me, than the necessity to press Shift when copying.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  That's kind of making the perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good. We can fix the copy/paste situation now, we can't necessarily fix the bigger problems so easily.
  - koiueo 1y ago
    But what is the solution? I don't see it. Doing meta+c/v like in mac? Thanks, no. Meta is allocated for windows manipulations in all my setups, and I'm pretty confident the approach where modifier keys are tied to specific "layers" of functionality is a more sound approach
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      I should probably have said "give people the tools to solve". The solution in the OP won't work out of the box for most people, but it would let everyone with a programmable keyboard bind to whatever they like
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      Re the Mac like approach, I don't think that's actually all that incompatible. Yes, everyone would have to rejig their window manipulation a little, but keyboard shortcuts are a fundamentally different "layer" to ANSI escape sequences...
      - koiueo 1y ago
        Totally agree on ANSI escape. But then to me windows manipulations is also an entirely different "layer". Conceptually copy/paste could fit into that layer. It's like cross-window interface. But what do we do with ctrl-z and ctrl-a, which are strictly text manipulation? That's why Alt, IMO, would be a better modifier. And it all organizes into layers like this: Ctrl - common ctrl sequences (like on Mac today) Alt - app layer (still works for terminal UIs btw, even today) Win - os/de/win layer
matheusmoreira 1y ago
> that makes the terminal (just text) feel like a different thing than just text to them Terminals are a lot more than just text. They were once physical machines. Now they are software emulating those old machines. These machines, physical or virtual, are controlled via in-band signaling. In many ways they are like extremely primitive browsers. Terminals are so old they actually predate copy paste. > it just feels like 99% of the world works and the 1% that doesn't is the terminal They don't actually work like all the other applications. They are completely different. Terminals are extremely complex legacy devices that require special kernel support to even work. The terminal line discipline is maintained by the kernel: Linux actually processes every single incoming and outgoing byte. Nobody really expects to be able to paste text into a video game running inside a Super Nintendo emulator. Terminals are like that. It's actually amazing that modern terminal emulators were able to provide this feature. > We terminal nerds lose nothing if more people understand terminals, quite the opposite. Do you want people to actually understand terminals? To me it seems like you want to change terminals into something new that just happens to be easier to understand. They wouldn't really be terminals then, would they? Things like ^C and ^D and ^[ are literally ASCII characters. Literally. Everything is ASCII text and that includes control characters, whose input is literally enabled by the Ctrl key. These bytes cause the terminal machine and sometimes even the kernel to do interesting things such as sending an interrupt signal to the slave program, closing its file descriptor or interpreting the next bytes as code in a sort of terminal instruction set. Typing on the keyboard just sends these codes into the system which can do any number of things in response. We simply cannot have "normal" copy/paste with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. If we did this, terminals would no longer be the simple ASCII input devices described above. Getting people to truly understand terminals means they have to understand all this.
- atoav 1y ago
  It may be a surprise to you, but there was nothing in your post that I didn't knew. I know all that. Just like I know the rationale behind Blender's Right-Click-select. The terminal as a tool is shaped by its history, but that doesn't mean we have to carry that history with us forever, especially not at all cost. And I say that as someone who values history and has a self-designed physical terminal bell next to my desk. Does your terminal emulator strike a physical bell when you send BEL? If it does not than your terminal has moved on in time for one reason or another. My point comes from the observation that the terminal is an extremely valuable tool to learn purely from an practical standpoint. Much more of that value comes from what it allows you to do, than from understanding how it works. Just like with Blender, where I as a former feelancer in VFX had no issue at all with right-click select, but occasional users would shake their fist at the heavens and complain about how bad Blender UI was with all its clever concepts. To them the historical understanding of the intricacies of the Blender UI and why "they are holding it wrong" would be utterly meaningless, what counts to them is that they can use the tool. And I agree. Would I be happy with just any redesign of the terminal? No. But would I be okay if a good redisgn stopped it from working with physical type writers hooked up to main frames or from talking telnet to my oscilloscope? Yeah. I am okay with that. If I really need that there is probably software that still support that and I install that. I know that this is not a simple change, but it is 2025 and we can think about how things should be instead of staying with how they always have been without reason, especially if we are just talking about the defaults.

by atoav 1y ago

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

In ideal world I'd want to have consistent copy/paste. I'm not saying it's perfect now. I'm just arguing that there are bigger UX problems IMO. BTW, text selection in terminals seems much more annoying to me, than the necessity to press Shift when copying.

swiftcoder 1y ago
That's kind of making the perfect-the-enemy-of-the-good. We can fix the copy/paste situation now, we can't necessarily fix the bigger problems so easily.
- koiueo 1y ago
  But what is the solution? I don't see it. Doing meta+c/v like in mac? Thanks, no. Meta is allocated for windows manipulations in all my setups, and I'm pretty confident the approach where modifier keys are tied to specific "layers" of functionality is a more sound approach
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    I should probably have said "give people the tools to solve". The solution in the OP won't work out of the box for most people, but it would let everyone with a programmable keyboard bind to whatever they like
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    Re the Mac like approach, I don't think that's actually all that incompatible. Yes, everyone would have to rejig their window manipulation a little, but keyboard shortcuts are a fundamentally different "layer" to ANSI escape sequences...
    - koiueo 1y ago
      Totally agree on ANSI escape. But then to me windows manipulations is also an entirely different "layer". Conceptually copy/paste could fit into that layer. It's like cross-window interface. But what do we do with ctrl-z and ctrl-a, which are strictly text manipulation? That's why Alt, IMO, would be a better modifier. And it all organizes into layers like this: Ctrl - common ctrl sequences (like on Mac today) Alt - app layer (still works for terminal UIs btw, even today) Win - os/de/win layer

matheusmoreira 1y ago

> that makes the terminal (just text) feel like a different thing than just text to them Terminals are a lot more than just text. They were once physical machines. Now they are software emulating those old machines. These machines, physical or virtual, are controlled via in-band signaling. In many ways they are like extremely primitive browsers. Terminals are so old they actually predate copy paste. > it just feels like 99% of the world works and the 1% that doesn't is the terminal They don't actually work like all the other applications. They are completely different. Terminals are extremely complex legacy devices that require special kernel support to even work. The terminal line discipline is maintained by the kernel: Linux actually processes every single incoming and outgoing byte. Nobody really expects to be able to paste text into a video game running inside a Super Nintendo emulator. Terminals are like that. It's actually amazing that modern terminal emulators were able to provide this feature. > We terminal nerds lose nothing if more people understand terminals, quite the opposite. Do you want people to actually understand terminals? To me it seems like you want to change terminals into something new that just happens to be easier to understand. They wouldn't really be terminals then, would they? Things like ^C and ^D and ^[ are literally ASCII characters. Literally. Everything is ASCII text and that includes control characters, whose input is literally enabled by the Ctrl key. These bytes cause the terminal machine and sometimes even the kernel to do interesting things such as sending an interrupt signal to the slave program, closing its file descriptor or interpreting the next bytes as code in a sort of terminal instruction set. Typing on the keyboard just sends these codes into the system which can do any number of things in response. We simply cannot have "normal" copy/paste with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. If we did this, terminals would no longer be the simple ASCII input devices described above. Getting people to truly understand terminals means they have to understand all this.

atoav 1y ago
It may be a surprise to you, but there was nothing in your post that I didn't knew. I know all that. Just like I know the rationale behind Blender's Right-Click-select. The terminal as a tool is shaped by its history, but that doesn't mean we have to carry that history with us forever, especially not at all cost. And I say that as someone who values history and has a self-designed physical terminal bell next to my desk. Does your terminal emulator strike a physical bell when you send BEL? If it does not than your terminal has moved on in time for one reason or another. My point comes from the observation that the terminal is an extremely valuable tool to learn purely from an practical standpoint. Much more of that value comes from what it allows you to do, than from understanding how it works. Just like with Blender, where I as a former feelancer in VFX had no issue at all with right-click select, but occasional users would shake their fist at the heavens and complain about how bad Blender UI was with all its clever concepts. To them the historical understanding of the intricacies of the Blender UI and why "they are holding it wrong" would be utterly meaningless, what counts to them is that they can use the tool. And I agree. Would I be happy with just any redesign of the terminal? No. But would I be okay if a good redisgn stopped it from working with physical type writers hooked up to main frames or from talking telnet to my oscilloscope? Yeah. I am okay with that. If I really need that there is probably software that still support that and I install that. I know that this is not a simple change, but it is 2025 and we can think about how things should be instead of staying with how they always have been without reason, especially if we are just talking about the defaults.