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There are some usability affordances in macos that are quite nice.

For example something as simple as copy and paste is command-c, everywhere.

In Ubuntu? control-c or control-shift-c. It is pretty annoying being in autopilot and killing the command line program you are in because you reflexively hit control-c.

Also, readline shortcuts work through out, so control-a will send you to the start of a line. Not with Ubuntu.



This is a common complaint, but this issue is that Mac users and Linux users basically talk past each other on this point. Just speaking for myself, I find that I accidentally kill a process in the Mac terminal whenever I try to copy anything because I can't keep Ctrl-C and Cmd-C separate (both Windows and Linux use Ctrl exclusively, which means you don't have to tell them apart).

If you're going to use Ctrl for shortcuts, you necessarily run into the issue needing a separate shortcut for copy in the terminal, because Ctrl-C has meant "send an interrupt signal to the process" since at least the 60s.

Fortunately, for people sufficiently annoyed by this, most Linux terminals do allow you to change keyboard shortcuts arbitrarily, so you can have unified copy shortcuts if you want. For a variety of reasons, I find this more trouble than it is worth and prefer sticking with the default.


The Linux way is to copy text anywhere just by selecting it and paste it with the middle mouse button.


it is the "primary" buffer, not clipboard.

macos also have it. that is part of application handling. iterm, alacritty, and bunch of other apps can behave the same. Including Xquartz.




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