[kqr]

I used to have a phone with a physical keyboard that had a ctrl key. I can't live without ctrl-z, ctrl-v, etc. This keyboard made it possible to go to a fully-touchscreen phone without being too miserable!

(Although some level of misery is hard to get out of with only a touchscreen.)

I have used this keyboard for over a year now I think and it's really good.

[metalliqaz]

I have never felt the loss of ctrl+key combinations on my phone. For what do you use these things? For example, if I'm already using my finger to select text, I can just long press to copy.

[makeitdouble]

The Select -> touch to copy is a miserable interaction to me.

Selecting the appropriate text is already a challenge in so many circumstances. Having to tap again exactly inside the selection, then choose from the floating menu are two more failure points and interaction lag.

It's especially painful when trying to select single characters (which happens a lot in CJK land).

I wish I could join the GBoard team for two weeks, just add an optional ctrl key, and quit.

PS: Actually, mapping the physical Volume Up to Copy, Volume Down to Paste whenever there's no media playing or some other condition could be the best choice.

[xp84]

This is probably irrelevant to you, but the Samsung keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy tablet has a control key. I love that keyboard. It’s been too long since I had a Samsung phone to know if it has an option for that too. It does have a number row option too, something I deeply resent not having an option for on iOS.

[JadeNB]

> … the Samsung keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy tablet has a control key. … It’s been too long since I had a Samsung phone to know if it has an option for that too.

I just tried on a Galaxy A54, and don't see such an option.

[kqr]

But I'm not selecting with gestures! I press ctrl-a most of the time. Then I might adjust with shift-space-swipe, much like I would with arrow keys on a physical keyboard.

I hate long pressing. It's so slow and imprecise.

Ctrl-z to undo is an action usually not available from the context menu or elsewhere.

Oh and pressing ctrl-d to send EOF in a subshell in Termux is much more convenient than typing "exit" or whatever.

[NooneAtAll3]

can you explain more about ctrl+d?

[notpushkin]

It sends the End Of File character. In most terminal applications, this ends an interactive session. E.g. if you're in a Python REPL and are done with it, you can press Ctrl-D and it will close and return to Bash. Press Ctrl-D once more and Bash will exit as well (and in most cases the terminal emulator will then close, too).

So, just a conventional shortcut to close things.

[NooneAtAll3]

how is it different from ctrl+c ?

[notpushkin]

Ctrl-C sends the SIGINT signal instead. It can be handled, too, and by default it will terminate the program. Semantics are a little different: you use Ctrl-D when the app expects input, and Ctrl-C when it's actively doing something and you want to interrupt it.

For example, in Python REPL, you can press ^C to interrupt a running piece of code:

    >>> while True:
    ...     pass
    ... 
    ^CTraceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    KeyboardInterrupt

You can't however exit the REPL with ^C:

    >>> (^C)
    KeyboardInterrupt

But if you press ^D it exits just fine.

Ruby's irb works the same (and of course Bash/zsh do, too). In Node.js, ^D works right away, and ^C first triggers a warning but you can press it the second time to exit.

[jazzyjackson]

On iOS there was at least at some point a "shake to undo" or a 3 fingered swipe I could never get to trigger, infuriating, I just live without undo now.

[vulcan01]

On recent iOS versions, you can tap the screen with 3 fingers to get a popup that has 3 options (undo, copy, and paste IIRC).

[xp84]

The 3 finger tap is infuriatingly hard to trigger for me since if you don’t sync your fingers’ taps perfectly, you’re tapping random elements on the screen, potentially doing something bad, like saving/sending out the bad change, that you were trying to undo. A single triple-tap would have been better, but also there is a full SQUARE INCH of wasted space below the iOS keyboard on current phones. Idk why they can’t make use of some of it to open a cut/copy/paste/undo menu, or heck, add command and control keys too!

[shwouchk]

Nice to know! I’m used to having to vigorously shake my phone for undo. And for it randomly popping on when i pull it from a pocket…

[lencastre]

What? When?

[creshal]

Finger text selection is really clumsy and error prone, and copypasting is even worse.

[alexisread]

One word, emacs ;)