Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 15:25 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Good by etienne
Parent article: GUADEC: A message from the release team

Actually, Microsoft pinched these shortcuts from Apple. In Apple's original (mid-1980s) Human Interface Guidelines, there is an explanation of the rationale behind the shortcuts. One must admit that »Control-C« for »copy« does make a certain amount of sense, while the wedge-shaped letter »V« in »Control-V« is supposed to suggest squeezing something in at some point, hence »paste«. Doesn't seem all that stupid, now does it – unless you're carrying lots of Unix baggage in your head, where »Control-C« means »kill the current process«.

Now Apple may or may not have come up with these by themselves or they may have in turn adopted the usage from the Xerox Star, which inspired the Macintosh GUI by way of the Apple LISA (I wouldn't know), but in this particular instance Microsoft doesn't appear to be the culprit.

Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 19:18 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

The actual question is why did Microsoft (and the CDE) choose "Ctrl" rather than the "Alt" key to emulate the Apple settings.

Earlier precedence with MSDOS programs (and with X and Andrew) was that "alt+letter" was far more often used to trigger actions. Also the Alt key on the PC at that time was positioned in exactly the same place as the "command" key on a Macintosh. So it would seem a no-brainer to use the Alt key instead.

I have a few theories as to why ctrl was chosen but I don't really know:

1. CDE wanted to work on machines that did not have any extra key other than Ctrl.

2. Non-PC programs designed for serial terminals had to use ctrl+letter for shortcuts, so they may have thought they were being consistent with this (though they were wrong, as they failed to think of the terminal emulator itself as a program). This may also explain the unintuitive use of shift+insert/del to avoid the shortcut key for operations that were not supported by older terminals.

3. Microsoft wanted existing MSDOS programs to be easily ported to run in a window. Since most were using Alt+letter for shortcuts they used ctrl to avoid interfering.

4. Some foreign keyboards were using the Alt key for typing non-ASCII letters (though was this actually prevalent in 1986?)

If anybody has the real reason, it would be interesting.