Comment by db48x
18 hours ago
Control-c meant cancel for decades before some idiot decided that it ought to mean copy instead.
As for your pinky, just type the chords correctly and you won’t hurt yourself. This means typing the modifier key(s) with the opposite hand instead of the same hand that is typing the letter. So for control-z you are going to type the “z” with your left hand, so use your right hand to type “control”. That’s why the keyboard has every modifier key on both sides.
> just type the chords correctly
Gee thanks.
I like to have my right hand on a mouse or trackpad, so two handed chords are much less convenient.
Macs manage to make one-handed chords for copy and paste ergonomic, but on a PC it's user error?
> Macs manage to make one-handed chords for copy and paste ergonomic
Cmd-C is not any more ergonomic than Ctrl-C. You are only speaking from position of habit. Pressing modifier with tucked in thumb is not great for it.
If someone is concerned about ergonomics, they should buy ergonomic keyboard. Standard layouts are crap.
Exactly. Either way the keys are too close together for comfortable, and quick, typing. The solution is to move your right hand back to the keyboard and to leave it there. Since selecting text is usually what you do right before you copy it, learn to select the text using keyboard commands.
Ah yes, computing luminary Larry Tesler, what an idiot, working at Xerox PARC. Whoof.
Decades is an exaggeration. It was less than a decade after Digital started using Control-C as a process interrupt in their PDP-10 operating systems (1967) to when Mr Tesler devised his mapping to a copy operation (1974-1976) for Smalltalk-76, and only four years after C was born. CP/M is the much more likely source of widespread usage of control-C as an interrupt, and it was contemporaneous (1974) with Tesler’s mapping.
But they weren’t combined on the same system until decades later, after Windows became nearly ubiquitous and Linux systems started copying things from it.