Ctrl + Shift + c
Ctrl + v
I use Arch, btw
I have ctrl-c and ctrl-v as mouse buttons
Meanwhile in Excel copy-paste is basically wired in with hopes and dreams
“These two columns… I see what you’re doing here, I’ll just continue that formula down ok?”
Great! How about this table? Can we copy this bit here and move it to-
“Your honor I have never seen this man in my life, I don’t speak English, and I think he’s threatening me.”
For me it’s because, at least historically speaking, there’s usually no immediate feedback whatsoever if the command was successful or not. And then in addition, individual applications can also disable it entirely, often with no indication. Then on top of that, I switch back and forth between OSes, and some like Mac have different command keys and my brain doesn’t always automatically do the translation – especially since I’m using the same keyboard for all of them.
So, from a strictly reactive sensory perspective, my failure rate with just the single ctrl + c command is far from the non-zero it would take for my brain to be convinced that just the one ‘c’ is sufficient. Hitting the ‘c’ many times also gives my brain a tiny bump of endorphins / dopamine / whatever over and above hitting it just the once. It’s like playing the lotto or playing a slot machine, except all I win is paste.
What if you’re in a terminal? Ctrl-C might not be the wisest choice.
FACT.
Does anyone here know why it’s unreliable?
Because your company makes you use Azure Virtual Desktop to connect to a VM and AVD’s clipboard handling is as unreliable as anything else from Microsoft?
That’s a sensible theory for when this happens at work (it’s Citrix in my case).
I’d swear it happens at home on Windows 10 as well, though. Maybe I am pressing it wrong sometimes. Either way, the meme is spot on for me.
Probably just because you typed C + Ctrl by accident.
Nah that’s not at all how that hand movement works. It’s always rest on Ctrl and then find C for me. It would also type “C” over the highlighted text, which would be very noticeable.
It wasn’t always like this.
I swear every version of Windows between 3.11 and XP was 100% reliable. Then it just started… slipping.
What’s weird is that it often works on the second try.
Because copy and paste started bring over formatting.
If you do control shift V, it removes it and is much more reliable.
No that’s not what I mean (plus it doesn’t work most of the time, either). It’s the copying that often fails for me, which I only notice when I paste and realize “wait a minute, these are the previous contents of the clipboard.”
I have unconfirmed theories.
- My C and V key are literally the most worn keys on my keyboard. The letters are completely worn off, they’re by far my most used keys. That amount of use probably makes the contacts degrade and less reliable.
- Windows 10 (I think?) introduced a “fancy clipboard” with history and multi paste and generally made it an “app”. In my experience the fancier it is the more failure points, since it’s no longer just a simple OS memory buffer, it has its own application logic.
- Since it’s a global hotkey, the OS has to:
- Handle the interrupt
- Query the currently active window / application for a “copy” output of the currently highlighted context
- Wait for a response
- Place that response into a buffer of some sort
- In a highly volatile asynchronous UI where the user can alt tab at any time, I imagine often what happens is that you just didn’t wait long enough for the data to actually copy. Pressing CTRL+C would be equivalent in reliability as waiting 2 seconds, but it’s more fun to press the button a bunch
Win + V shortcut shows clipboard history on Win 11 and works well for me. I haven’t looked for anything similar on Linux yet using the Super key.
Kde keeps clipboard history in the system tray, its probably possible to bind it to a hotkey as well
I’m pretty sure it’s bound to Super+V by default now. It’s bound like that for me and I don’t remember if I changed it in global keybinds or not.
The best alternative I found was CopyQ, but I did have to write some custom automation scripts to move the window into position and close it when clicking away
y pgang rise upMy favourite activity is
yypppppppppppWhy not yy11p eh!
Ah, a fellow golfer, I see.
Not nearly as satisfying
I disagree, executing obscure commands like that makes me feel extra smug
Hah!
On most distros/de(or whatever determines this behaviour, idk) on linux you can just select and then middle mouse click. Its so convenient
Is there a reason why it sometimes doesn’t work? I use arch and i’m kind of a noob when it comes to linux. I did the middle mouse tging for a bit and it seems hit and miss or i’m too stupid. Like sometimes it works, and sometimes it keeps pasting the thing i copied 10 min ago, and it doesn’t matter how often i copy a new thing.
As Synapse already said, applications need to support it.
But also your display manager needs to support it if it’s a wayland one, and there might be a setting for it (also in applications).
The feature is called primary selection, FYI.
The Ctrl+C and the mouse select are 2 different buffers. Some applications do not accept the mouse select buffer though, and that’s annoying.
In the best case you can CTRL+C some text, then go mouse select another, and paste both in a new place with CTRL-V and middle mouse button. Don’t mix the order tho.
On linux
kdeyou can highlight & middle clickEdit: ive only ever used kde seriously so didn’t realise this was an x/ wayland thing.
Pretty sure that’s an X (and I guess now Wayland) thing, not a KDE thing. I could be wrong, but I think you could sit down at a VAX from the '80s and expect it to work.
Thanks for the correction!
i have this in hyprland which is wayland 👍
That was part of X right? Not jusy KDE. And a lot of wayland stuff also has it.
Probably my most hated feature that I couldn’t turn off. Every time I expected middle click to start scrolling in VSCode or a word document or any app really, it would paste my clipboard instead, and I would die a little inside
Where’s CTRL + INSERT, SHIFT + INSERT
And here is someone who has absolutely at some point in history modified the source code to GORILLAS.BAS.
I’ve been stubbornly using that for years but eventually the convenient placement of c/v won me over.
Watch out this person has computers that still have insert keys!
Don’t they all? Maybe not tkl boards, but maybe via fiction key like on some laptops?
Ah yes the function key.
That key nobody ever uses.
thank you.
If you can’t trust the C button, better use CMD not CTRL, because you are likely on a mac
Ctrl+C→Ctrl+Shift+C→Ctrl+Shift+V→Ctrl+V👑 🧊When copying from a browser,
Ctrl + Shift +Ccauses something like the debugger to open.I was sharing the mechanism for copying between vms within Qubes OS, which is a bit different from traditional operating systems. First you copy to the clipboard of the current qube, then copy to the shared clipboard, then paste from the shared clipboard into the clipboard of the destination qube, and finally paste within that destination qube.
