Reclaim Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for familiar Copy and Paste in gnome-terminal

Most people work with graphical desktops. Most desktop (GUI) applications use the Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for Copy and Paste actions respectively. One gets use to these really fast. However, when working with bash shell running inside a gnome-terminal those key bindings mean something different i.e. Ctrl+C sends the kill signal to the foreground process and Ctrl+V is used for quoted insert functionality (i.e. to enter control keys literally). This is the legacy of the command line oriented Unix terminals based on tty (stty - program that controls the settings of tty devices).

In this entry I describe how to make Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V do Copy and Paste in gnome-terminals. Here is how to do it:

Open a gnome-terminal window and type the following commands:

> stty intr ^K         # free Ctrl+C for copy
> stty lnext ^-        # free Ctrl+V for paste
> stty -g
> stty -g > ~/.stty    # store the settings in home directory

Add the following to .bashrc

case $- in
*i*)
stty `cat ~/.stty`     #  reload the stored stty settings
bind -u quoted-insert  #  unbind the quoted-insert function of bash - free Ctrl+V for paste
esac

Now using the gconf-editor, edit the gnome-terminal's key bindings (@ /apps/gnome-terminal/keybindings key).

Close and reopen the terminal window. And now Ctrl+C will copy and Ctrl+V will paste.