I decided to reinstall Tumbleweed, after a few days considering an openSUSE-free existence. Whenever I install it I like to tweak it to get it to a state I find usable. To do this I installed i3 and a few related programs and set up my old configs (which includes ~/XTerm), which are stored here https://github.com/fusion809/i3-configs/tree/opensuse, which I did by symlinking the files in my local copy of this repo to the appropriate locations in my system. Everything seemed fine until I realized that the shortcut I’m used to, Ctrl-C for copy, isn’t working. When I press it I get a new line (i.e. the terminal prompt just jumps to a new line, nothing is copied to the clipboard, at all). This is despite this line in ~/XTerm:
Ctrl C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD)
\
and these in ~/.Xresources:
Ctrl C: copy-selection(CLIPBOARD)
\
on previous Tumbleweed installs this didn’t happen, Ctrl-C did what I had assigned it to do, copy on Ctrl-C. Can yas think of a way to fix this?
I have always assumed that “xterm” is supposed to emulate a basic terminal. And this include CTRL-C generating an interrupt (SIGINT) of the running program.
OK, well I suppose that makes sense, although no processes were running aside from the shell and it didn’t kill the shell so that’s odd. On other distros and previously on Tumblewleed this shortcut worked fine thanks to my XTerm config. So the question here is how to get this shortcut to work like it does on other distros and like it did on previous Tumbleweed installs.
There was a significant update to “xterm” recently (at least on Tumbleweed). And perhaps that change the behavior. It did change the default font size, and people complained about that on mailing lists.
You might just need to use a different terminal emulator to get what you want.
Yes, for most CLI people Ctrl-C is the interrupt and nothing else. And it depends on the running program what happens. The shell just echos ^C and gives a new prompt. vi suggests to use quit when you want to end it, others may simply bail out. Yes, Ctrl-C is an important key.
And in X you select text simply by holding down the mouse button at the beginning (or end), then move to the other side and release the button. It is then “under your middle button” ready to be pasted by clicking left on the place where to paste and then clicking middle to paste it. Works so for tens of years. And in modern DEs it is also puts in the clipboard at the top without any extra action needed.
Thus I see no need for an extra keyboard action (jumping from mouse to keyboard and v.v. :(), let alone for one that uses Ctrl-C
But you may have a different feeling in your fingers and mind and I understand that when such things change, it is difficult to change habits.