[lug] Cutting and Pasting..

Anders Knudsen andersk at uswest.net
Fri Mar 2 22:45:06 MST 2001


This is one area where Apple did it right the first time out of the box 
with the Mac.
Add a key, the command key, and bind those common functions to it -- copy, 
paste, cut, undo, etc., etc.
So all Mac apps, from day 1, have had command-C for copy, command-V for 
paste, etc.
Windows only recently has made ctrl-C the "universal" key bind for copy. It 
used to be different windows apps had different key bindings for those 
common functions. You may actually find some windows apps that still do not 
conform.
Since both Apple and Ms have control over what goes into apps and the like, 
this is easier for them. It may be very hard to get all unix 
(X/Gnome/Kde/whatever) apps to all use the same key bindings for those 
common functions.
:)

>I'd have to agree with it also, I hate some of the key combinations.
>Historically, there was no inter-application dedicated communications
>service. One of the ideas behind the ORB server of gnome is to provide
>such a universal means, but it won't help except for applications that
>participate in it. With gnome the means is there, but all the old
>applications that were built before gnome existed, and for those that
>don't want to be strictly gnome, it is a problem. Then there is the
>conflict with some of the standardized command line meanings, versus
>what has been learned from Windows and elsewhere...control-c has
>typically meant to send a kill signal on command line UNIX, while it is
>copy in Windows. I think a lot of older apps that added clipboard style
>functionality (such as Netscape) ended using alt instead of control to
>avoid overriding the old control-c meaning. There doesn't seem to be
>much benefit to this altered keybinding, and I also wish it was
>consistent; I dislike Windows, but I think the keybindings there make
>more sense.




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