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by layer8 318 days 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.
1 comments
em-bee 318 days ago
ah, that's a history detail i didn't know about. very well, it's apple's fault then :-)
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quesera 318 days ago
Apple did it correctly!

Apple provided a new modifier key (Command, or ⌘) for our GUI shell. Or Open Apple/Closed Apple if you go back to the Apple II days. Control still works like it should.

Microsoft said "Hey that's useful, but we don't make hardware, and we don't have a Command key, so let's break things and reuse Control in our copycat GUI, and ignore all of the historical uses of control characters. What could go wrong?"

And then Linux (Gnome??) said "Hey we don't make hardware either, let's do what Microsoft did, because lots of people are familiar with it, and even though the historical uses of control characters are really important on Unix-like operating systems."

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em-bee 317 days ago
you are right, apple didn't clobber ctrl-c and i should have realized that (facepalm). it IS microsofts fault. makes one wish microsoft started making keyboards earlier. maybe we would have gotten that command key everywhere.

on the linux end we didn't really have much choice then. we wanted to get people to switch from windows.

but technically, neither microsoft now linux clobbered ctrl-c in the terminal. if i remember ctrl-c does not work to select text in a DOS window, and it does not on a linux terminal either.

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em-bee 312 days ago
TIL from this talk: https://youtu.be/ajfb5LSbQVM that all the control keys that we still use today have a corresponding encoding in ASCII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_character#In_ASCII and that the control-keys were designed to emit those characters. i kind of implicitly knew that, but never made the direct connection, especially that it was ASCII that defined which control key would be assigned to which control character.
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