← Back to context

Comment by em-bee

1 day ago

nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS. selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux.

but i agree with your general point: we can collectively do better than emulating 1970s hardware

absolutely!

7 comments

em-bee

Reply
mananaysiempre  21 hours ago

Nit: didn’t Ctrl-X/C/V come from the original Macintosh? I thought Windows initially followed IBM’s CUA, where cut / copy / paste are instead Shift-Delete / Ctrl-Insert / Shift-Insert (and those still work too).

  • layer8  21 hours ago

    The original Macintosh had Command-X/C/V, and Windows 3.0 adopted that in addition to the existing CUA shortcuts, but changed Command to Control, as Alt was already in use for menus and form control shortcuts on Windows. So it’s true that Ctrl+C for Copy only became a thing with Windows.

rollcat  21 hours ago

> nitpick: ctrl-c never meant copy until windows started to dominate. it didn't even mean that in DOS.

VT102 wasn't designed with multiplexing in mind. The device was meant as a primary way to interact with a computer, not to perform the tasks of one - your physical keyboard also doesn't understand "copy".

> selecting more than one screens worth of text is possible in gui terminals and also in tmux.

It is but it isn't. You want to copy a multiline snippet of code you just wrote, you will have to manually strip away $PS1 & $PS2. You want to copy from vi into another window, you can't use the mouse - and you have to use a side channel.

I have 20+ unfixable issues outlined, and I'm in the process of writing a blog post... But at my current rate, it could become a book.