I am having a problem with LibreOffice. When I press Ctrl-C, the program makes a copy. When I press Ctrl-V, instead of pasting, LibreOffice opens the view menu.
In the Windows version of LibreOffice, Ctrl-V pastes, and Alt-V opens the View menu.
Any ideas? I can use Alt-V to paste in LibreOffice, but I don’t want a situation where a key combination does one thing on one computer, and a different thing on another computer.
Thanks
Using ALT instead of CTRL is the Haiku way, although that can be changed in the (I think) Keyboard preferences.
Alt instead of Ctrl is the Haiku way? Really?
Why?
Ah. OK. Thanks.
Because that’s how it worked on BeOS?
I am flabbergasted! I have been “using” Haiku for a couple of years now, mainly browsing, and I never noticed that. Perhaps I have always cut and pasted using a mouse rather than the keyboard. Sadly, right now the mouse is dead.
It’s perhaps not surprising that there are problems with copy and paste in LibreOffice.
I have to say that is is a bit of a shock!
You can switch the shortcut keys in the Keymap preferences (not Keyboard). Maybe you set that and forgot about it?
LibreOffice shows the shortcuts as being CTRL and not ALT, so I’m not surprised if there’s some confusion about which key is supposed to do what.
As @MrEntropy noted, the reason Haiku uses Alt is because the BeOS used the Alt key as the system modifier – much in the way that the Mac uses the Command key over Ctrl as well. And the reason I bring this comparison up is because on the Mac keyboard, the Command key generally sits in the same spot that the Alt key (Option on the Mac, where the Super key would be on a PC) does, which makes it a lot easier to use when going between the two (Be had run on its own hardware and Mac boxes/clones first, then Intel machines later). Also, the other advantage of this is that in the Terminal, for example, there’s no conflicts over key bindings (like having to press Ctrl+Shift+C, etc. on Gnome, KDE, and so on due to this dilemma) as it ‘frees’ up the control key to work on its own.
All that said, however, I can see where getting Ctrl switched around is annoying if you primarily use or prefer it. In the classic BeOS, you could change the modifier key from Alt to Ctrl in Menu preferences, and in Haiku, this has moved to the Keymap preferences, where it’s possible to “switch to Windows/Linux mode” with the press of a button. (And as a bonus, it’s also possible to switch Command to Ctrl on Mac OS 10.3.9 and up, although it might make using it a bit awkward).
Thank you all so much. You have no idea how long it took to try and fix this before I was told it was just a one-button press in the Keymap dialogue box.
I got bogged down in Keyboard options. First I was delighted to find that there were not one, but four, Thinkpad keyboards listed. Delight was short-lived, however, when I discovered that they all predated my 2007 T61P, which has four keys to the left of the space bar.
Anyway, problem solved. Thanks again.
A tip:
Look the haiku tour, user guide, besly knowledge base.
I had a look in all the places you mention, but there is a lot of documentation to read through and if the answer is there I must have missed it.
When I know Haiku rather better I will be glad to help with translations. At the moment, BeSly is hard going for an English speaker.
We have many tutorials in english. But they are not included the new side at the moment. Select on our knowledge base “old besly” to visit the old website or try our tutorial finder from http://software.besly.de.
Be free to translate our tutorials if you like, we are happy over every help. My english is not the best and some people mean that i should write only in my main language and not translate them.
I have to confess that your English is a million times better than my German! Or French, or Spanish, both of which I formally “learned” at one time.
My Kiswahili is probably better than many people’s, though. 