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Firefox is ending support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, and users are urged to switch to Linux (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 6 months ago (4 children)

What's wrong with Ctrl+C to copy? Its the default shortcut on pretty much everything except terminals.

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  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Whats wrong with using the metric system to represent quantities? Its the default on pretty much everything except fueling planes or operating satellites. /s

    The conflict arises from having two different defaults for the same action. Since users frequently switch between these environments, the lack of a universal shortcut causes constant friction.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The key issue is that the request is to change behavior in one place (browser) to match that of a rare case (terminal), causing a mismatch with the frequent case (office suites, mail programs, ...). The terminal is the odd one out, not the browser, and ought be the one to change the default for the reason you provide.

    In practice, a terminal is a special case and not just a text input window, and current convention is that Ctrl + C aborts / cancels.

    (You could of course have a duplicate hotkey, but now you are inconsistent w.r.t. other browsers, and there will be someone else who will be annoyed by the difference)

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Actually, Ctrl+C is the ASCII Code for the control character ETX (End of Text) since the early 60s. This is not a hotkey but a control character. To change this system, you'd have to change not only dozends of terminal emulators and the kernels of all unixoid operating systems, but at least ANSI, Unicode and Posix, too. And Windows, by the way - even Microsoft uses ctrl+c in both cmd.exe and powershell to kill the running process.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago*

    To be similarly pedantic: Ctrl+C is a hotkey that sends the corresponding ASCII code / codepoint to signal something, it is not an ASCII code itself.

    You could have the same character be sent by using Ctrl+Q (if you were to remap it), and not break compatibility with other processes while doing so: the codepoint being sent would be the same. From a technological perspective there is nothing special about the key combination Ctrl+C specifically, but altering this behavior in a terminal absolutely wreak havoc on the muscle memory of terminal users, and altering it's behavior in a text editor on everyone else's.

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