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m3galinux • today at 5:17 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

On PC the "original" (Windows 3.0 and earlier) shortcuts for cut/copy/paste were Ctrl-Del, Ctrl-Ins, and Shift-Ins respectively. I believe these were inherited from some older IBM user access standards. And for the most part they still work in Windows, especially in command lines.

Ctrl-X/C/V were originally Macintosh (and maybe Xerox before that?) and then were adopted by Windows in the 3.1 era so Word for Windows would match up better with Word for Mac. But PC not having a Command key, and the Windows key not being a thing yet, they were applied to Control instead. Which of course overlapped with the other major use of Ctrl-C as "interrupt" starting back into early UNIX machines (and adopted by DOS) but... being a graphical environment they apparently didn't consider that important at the time.