If you come from a windows operating system, I'm sure that you tried at least once to copy paste on the terminal using the CTRL + C & CTRL + V shortcut. Everyone knows CTRL + C and CTRL + V , as it's one of the most used shortcuts for copy and pasting.
However, when it comes to Linux terminal, these shortcuts won't work.
For example, CTRL + C on Linux terminal can interrupt a process, so you can use this shortcut to terminate an application, but not for copying.
On the other hand CTRL + V doesn't paste either.
The correct shortcut for copy and pasting on Linux terminal, is SHIFT + CTRL + C for copying and SHIFT + CTRL + V for pasting.
Even though there's no problem with the current shortcuts, there's a way to change these shortcuts and make them shorter.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to enable CTRL + C & CTRL + V shortcuts for copying and pasting on Linux terminal, without having to press the shift key.
Enable CTRL + C / CTRL + V Shortcuts
Launch the terminal that you use, or the terminal where you want to enable these shortcuts.
Next, right click over the terminal window, and go to "Preferences"
Once you are in the settings window, go to "Shortcuts"
Now, you can create the shortcuts for CTRL + C and CTRL + V. To do this, locate copy and paste options on the list, and double click to each function to assign a new shortcut.
When you double click to the option that you want to assign the new shortcut, you will see the "New accelerator" as shown below, press your keys once the shortcut is in "New accelerator" mode.
This is how the shortcuts should look like. In this tutorial, we assigned CTRL + C to copy function, and CTRL + V to the paste function.
Now you can close the window by clicking to X button, and use the new shortcuts.
Note: CTRL + C and CTRL + V are now two shortcuts that you can use to copy and paste text on your terminal. Meaning if you have other shortcuts assigned to these key combinations, then you won't be able to use them when using the terminal.
Reset CTRL + C & CTRL + V Shortcuts
If you want to use the old shortcuts and want to delete the shortcuts that you created, you can easily reset them via dconf tool.
Reset Copy Shortcut
dconf reset /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/keybindings/copy
Reset Paste Shortcut
dconf reset /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/keybindings/paste
The commands above will assign the default shortcuts for copy (SHIFT + CTRL + C) and pasting(SHIFT + CTRL + V).
Conclusion
In this tutorial, you learned how to enable copy and pasting option on Linux terminal when using CTRL + C and CTRL + V keys. We also explained why these shortcut won't work on Linux by default.
