This post was brought to you by me habitually using ctrl+ins and shift+ins for copy and paste. My new laptop has insert on a fn layer. The fn key is next to ctrl and shift at least, but this has thrown me off my mojo enough that I'm consider modifying the keymap to swap del and insert.
@oblomov@TomF@aeva those bindings show me that the standard for copying is not copy&past but cut&paste. Same on plan 9: copy is a cut followed by an immediate paste.
@oblomov@TomF@aeva That's not how standards work. Just because there's also wireless these days doesn't mean Ethernet is not still a standard.
Most Windows apps and controls to this day still support the CUA shortcuts for copy & paste.
Alt-F4 to exit? CUA. Ctrl-F for find and F3 for find next? CUA. F10 to open and highlight menu bar? CUA. Dialog boxes using <Return> to mean OK and <Esc> Cancel? CUA. Navigating form elements via (Shift-)Tab? CUA. Checkboxes square, radio buttons round? CUA.
@oblomov@TomF@aeva I'm just old enough to have used several pre-CUA DOS programs from the mid-late 80s, and then seen post-CUA apps in the 90s and onwards, including Windows.
Trust me. They did not fail to standardize things on the PC. On the contrary, on the whole they were so successful that CUA's influence has become invisible because "shrug but everyone does that"
@oblomov@TomF@aeva Apple's Human Interface Guidelines on the Mac side and IBM's CUA on the PC side are the reason we still have a pretty consistent look & feel for GUI apps now going on 40 years on, and if you've used one of the few apps from before then, trust me, the difference is very much felt to this day
@oblomov@TomF@aeva I had to learn how to select text, copy and paste it in WordStar, and had to learn it again differently in Emacs and Vim both (many years later). I also had to learn how to select text (shift+cursor movement) and cut/copy/paste in QBASIC/DOS EDIT. And then that one way I learned there worked also in Borlands Turbo Pascal IDE, and in Windows edit controls, and in Notepad and Write (later WordPad) and MS Office and the Visual Studio IDE and ...
@rygorous@oblomov@TomF I can't comment on what is reasonable for vim, but I'm perpetually surprised that the emacs devs don't simply update the defaults to match contemporary user interface standards and just let the stubborn people restore the old defaults with a command like "(regress-defaults year)", but then I remember "stubborn people" currently includes stallman and all of the stallman clones wearing their windswept black robes as they shamble around muttering "tradition" over and over
@TomF@aeva Microsoft has been breaking them lately. Some parts of Edge and Teams don’t acknowledge them. Really frustrating because Microsoft practically forces you to use Edge these days.
@aeva I mostly use primary selection these days. I fear the day laptops with physical mouse buttons above the touchpad stop being made. Middle-clicking gestures seem like a pain to use.
@aeva
hold on, this might actually be a gamechanger, for one simple reason:
it's a cut/copy/paste command that works the same across emacs and firefox.
it also seems like wayland/sway will emulate the functionality somewhat for software that doesn't support it already.
@lily it's quite standard. very few things don't support it, and they're almost always programs that are dropping the ball on quite a lot of other UI things
@lily I do like that thing where you can select stuff on linux to copy it and middle click to paste it, but I got out of the habit of relying on it once laptop manufactures unilaterally decided that I didn't need a scroll wheel or a middle mouse button (and because most of my computing these days is on my work-provided windows workstation)
@aeva@lesley Vim/Neovim are entirely keyboard driven and awesome once you get past the significant learning curve. Then cut, copy, paste is just d, y, p.
@drhoopoe@lesley so feigning ignorance aside, I tried to switch to vim about 15 years ago, and quickly realized that my inability to consistently remember keyboard shortcuts combined with me being a dvorak user meant that there was going to be nothing for me in there.
@aeva@drhoopoe I have similar experience. I think the modal editor mechanism is pretty cool but I just can't memorize the default vim key bindings. For example, as a gamer, I would prefer arrow shape like ijkl much more than hjkl.
Copilot is great! Press the Copilot key, then type "insert text from clipboard" or "copy highlighted text to clipboard" and watch Copilot delete your file!
@rygorous@aeva Wait, I’ve been a C++ dev for about 20 years — much of it on Windows, and I’ve never used it*. Does the pause/break key pull up the debugger for the current window’s exe or something?
*Okay, I used to use it to pause text output in MS-DOS.
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