Why ctrl v for paste

It would be intuitive and easy to remember. According to this Wikipedia article, the Apple Lisa and Macintosh were the first computers to map those functions to key combinations, along with Undo. They basically used the keys closest to the 'command' key.

You'd notice that these keys form a convenient "diamond" on a keyboard. When special cursor keys were introduced, some keyboards had them laid out as a diamond rather than the current one-over-3 layout and that seemed really odd when it first appeared. As well, the control key was just to the left of the A key on many keyboards, which made using that diamond easy to type while leaving your hand on the "home row".

Control-A was back-one-word, control-F forward-one-word; control-R and Control-C moved by "one screen" usually about 11 lines up or down. This was cumbersome- but a whole lot easier than handwriting or retyping although as late as , we still had a "word-processor operator" who would retype documents because she simply refused to listen for long enough to be taught how to edit stored documents. Joy, her name was - and a right misery, too. The C key is comfortably positioned relative to the Ctrl key; that's [likely] why it's been chosen for the Copy shortcut.

The P key, on the other hand, is too far away from the Ctrl key. You can press both with your left hand while it remains in a natural and rested position, even if you have small hands. The Z , X , and V keys are immediate neighbors to C and are used with other keyboard shortcuts for the same reason.

With time they choose to adopt the Apple Standard as it's popular and easier to use. Of course one could argue that both C and X are very similar to their actions, making that position the best suited for the action set. In the end it's major conjectures theories as of why the first Apple OS Computers of the nineties used these shortcuts, but probably it's simply because someone thought that would be a very useful set to have and would be used so much that they must be close to the Command Control in windows came much after.

One thing that no one has mentioned so far: none of these other basic text editing shortcuts match the first letter of their actions. They are:. Maybe you could stretch that and say "eXtract" instead of "cut", but that word is not really used anywhere for that shortcut.

On the other hand, all four of these shortcuts are positioned right next to each other in the bottom left corner of the keyboard. In most of the other languages the names for these commands start with other names and would thus not match either.

This is actually a very common mistake, so there are e. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Ask Question. Asked 6 years ago. Active 5 years, 11 months ago. Viewed 74k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen 6 6 bronze badges. You mean Vaste right? Incidentally, I note this question says "selected So if were forced to let go of my mouse for every paste operation to sniper that P key then I would not be a happy programmer.

Show 15 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Oh boy was I surprised to see a key previously used as modifier-only suddenly to have a action if pressed on its own. And all this time I thought the keys were picked because of their relative position on the keyboard. One didn't have to move many muscles to do either. The keys picked for the applications where they used me as the data enterer, were based on ease of data entry.

For instance, the programmer insisted that each entry be terminated with a carriage return, causing me to "lose" my place on the keyboard. I asked for the space character to be the equivalent terminating character. It took a huge fight with the programmer, but I told him that the rate of data entered would double if he made the change that rate of data entered was one of the customer's criteria.

But Command-Z for Undo seems to have been introduced with the Mac. It's supposed to be "intuitive," dontcha know. What are you: an idiot or something? My mnemonics can beat up your mnemonics. Most discussion about mnemonic value doesn't deal with the fact that what is mnemonic to me may be Greek to you and v.

Much of it is what you get used to. I posted the following in comp. Peter Seebach is the moderator of the group and he may remember it. You should know that. Dijkstra boomed from the back of the room: "becomes! Since, no one in his right mind would use gets due to the no bag-limit input , "gets" will work beautifully. I've never had the semantic problem that these worthies have had. I know. Excellent mnemonic value!

Now needing a symbol for exclusive or, we take "'". The "'" looks like a one and one true means true result on exclusive or. Now needing symbols for less than and greater than and having possibly irritated Messrs. These changes will add much needed mnemonic value to C and reduce confusion. Well, this is an excellent time to correct that and design a more powerful one or leave it out altogether.

If the former, the redesigner can make it easier to use and if the latter, having to remember nothing is certainly mnemonic. Sincerely, Gene "Don't mess with my sig or I'll mess with your mind! I don't know about "delete line" but Windows uses it for "delete block". Making the Mac highly desirable for folks who had three hands - two for the keyboard, and one for the mouse. You are looking at the wrong frame of reference. Was it ever ported to the USCD operating system?

Don't forget cmd-Z for Undo. Basically they took the top of the standard Edit menu Undo, Cut. Copy, Paste and put them on the four keys at the lower left of the keyboard, closest to the single?

Some programs even used command-B to mean Clear, which was normally the command below Paste. I hope it didn't seem as though I was saying something like the last line above. I meant my remark as a dig at the marketeers who have ruined that word. You have it right, Gene. In a perfect world, a lot more people would be as sensitive as you are to the intentions behind people's words. That's "a lot more," not "all. I'm not sure if that's a toss at me or at someone else, but I'll field it.

In WordStar -- Ctrl-Z scrolls the viewframe down a line. Undo is Ctrl-U. Ctrl-X moves the cursor down a line. Delete Marked Block is Ctrl-Ky. Ctrl-C scrolls the viewframe down a frame. Copy Marked Block is Ctrl-Kc. Ctrl-V is Overtype, i. No clipboard, no "paste. I believe Apple started with C for "copy" and X for "X out" or "scissors" and took it from there.

It would be an interesting question to ask the folks whose signatures are inside the early Mac case, molded onto the back cover. C is a natural for "copy," and the letter is one of the easiest to hit no matter where your modifier key is, so I doubt that Apple had WordStar's Ctrl-Kc in mind when making that assignment.

They were enormously creative, ya gotta give 'em that. So for safety's sake, all deletions were in the awkward area between a touch typist's hands: T, Y, G, and H. But neither Apple nor Microsoft will allow it, even as an option. I think this is because they want people locked into architecture-specific keystrokes, and Ctrl is universal. I don't believe it was. IBM and probably Microsoft worked with Sorcim and others so that apps would be available for the as soon as it appeared.

The word processors, of course, relied heavily on IBM's function, arrow, and editing keys. Along came WordStar, which laughed at those keys they worked, but you didn't need them , and BOOM, zero to seventy-five percent in less than six months, without bundling or as far as I know great hoopla. It took WPCorp, et al. It oughta make ya think. I asked for the. I believe I learned this from some old Amiga documentation; on the Amiga you use the left Amiga key instead of the control key. Is there any truth behind my recollections?

Hannu Rummukainen. Then the "power" versions, one key further over Not bad. It's not necessarily the intention. Often, it's the effective use. Nice fireworks when one points this out. It's not as if shovelling B. That date may not be accurate, though. Another possibility, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, is that these key assignments were influenced by the UCSD P-system, which was used for the initial Lisa development and which definitely affected other aspects of the design.

I use it every day. On deke. Or for the real cleverdicks of this world. On ds Ctrl being :common to all machines, he didn't want people using it. His job was :harder than Jobs's: he didn't have direct, absolute control over :hardware and application design. With the cash and the clout :afforded by his control of the operating system, however, he could :reward or punish other companies according to whether or not they :toed the line.

You can't deny the :possibility out of hand. First check out the command keystrokes of :big-name eighties-era word processors. The :keystrokes tell all. If it was profit motive, sticking with the lowest common denominator would have remained important. They forgot that it's a lot easier to learn some interesting keystrokes than it is for an experienced typist to break off from typing every so often to eg move up a paragraph.

Oh, here's an example of fun. I use vi extensively at work, but my Alpha workstation has no ESC key Take a look at a NeXT keyboard, and you get obvious confirmation. I suspect it might have to do with the fact that before there was Windows, and before there was NeXT, there was Macintosh. And that's how it's done on the Mac. I don't know why the Mac does it that way. What you mean is the Y key!

No, no, no. Z goes between A and E, surely? You're thinking of the W key. There are probably other changes. And Andrew was thinking of the French Belgian? Assimilate you, we will". Repeat after me: It started on the Mac. It started on the Mac. It started on the Mac In Windows 1. Ah yes. On a recent trip to Germany, I was faced with the deceptively daunting task of writing program documentation in MSWord, using a German keyboard with the keycaps laid out as above.

So now, although I could type normally, as long as I didn't look at the keyboard, whenever I did look, I couldn't even type my own name! And then, when I put the documents on floppy and flew home, and loaded them up in Word on my own PC, all kinds of wierdness happened, since the MSWord in Germany was set up for the European paper sizes - something like 9x Send mail for help. No, really! Unsolicited email is not welcome, and will be billed for at consulting rates.

And with those evil keyboads with the control-key-in-exile, several days of heavy emacs work sent me to a physician to check out the strain. But now I have three genuine AT keyboards. If they weren't descended from CDOS, I don't know when they started multitasking, and I also don't know when it became concurrent. But I do know that in I had an 8mhz with K and no hard disk running word star, pip, and something else simultaneously.

After using WS for a short period, the layout made a lot of sense, and I could figure out what commands that I'd never used, but thought should exist, were assigned to. But I could do that with Word through version 3 or maybe 4. But it used to. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was walking down the hall and saw a piece of plastic on the floor. It was an escape key that had taken it's label far too literally. Here's the japanese kana keyboard. Paul Guertin p Thank you!

It has been added to the collection. Been meaning to do this for a long time Below is how the Bopomofo syllabary, a.

Zhuyin Fuhao or National Phonetic Alphabet, is laid out. I've used Yale romanization rather than the now-ubiquitous Pinyin because it's the same in many cases, I know it better, and it gives a better approximation of the sounds for non-Sinophone English speakers. The numbers are tones 3 and 4 are on the 3 and 4 keys; first tone is the space bar.

Power typists mostly use stroke-based systems; this is for folks like me who only occasionally type Chinese: b o d e 3 4 j r 2. It's the TLD for flying saucers and other extra-terrestrial craft.

I've been abducted. Either that, or I made a typo in my signature. That's interesting. I didn't know such a thing existed. What was the card connected to? Did it use the standard hi-res mode? It went in one of the expansion slots.

I'm pretty sure it used the standard hi-res mode and didn't require any special connections. It may have been available only in Taiwan. I got one for a friend and used it only briefly.

Richard E. Hawkins Esq. If it was profit. Are you baiting me? Not likely! It wasn't supposed to be more "intuitive. Half of those keystrokes had no function, and of the other half only three or four depending on the release were documented, in WordPerfect 5. Half had no function in DisplayWrite 4.

Do I have to do everything myself around here? Questions of "intuitiveness" aside, that tutorial makes no mention of Ctrl except in the sentence "The cursor is moved using the arrow keys, and the Home, End, PageDown, PageUp and Ctrl keys.

There is certainly justification for the way vi works; there is no justification for leaving thirty-two command keystrokes dead on an integrated console, or for forcing word-processing professionals' hands out of typing position. Speaking of "intuitiveness," check out what Jef Raskin, the original Mr.

Thank goodness for copycats—I mean, standards. X for Cut because X looks like a pair of scissors. Things break down when more than one command starts with the same letter.

But what about the Start Dictation command? I guess keyboard shortcuts are on my mind lately because of a massive mistake Apple made in It goes like this:. It works on every video site YouTube, Netflix, Hulu But in Apple introduced a new Mac Photos app.

To play a video, you had to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse or track pad. This from the company that invented the space bar playback convention! You can change almost any Mac keyboard shortcut to whatever you want, and free programs let you do the same in Windows. Who wants to do that? This article was originally published with the title "A Meditation on Keyboard Shortcuts" in Scientific American , 6, 26 December Credit: Nick Higgins.