We've all pressed Ctrl+C a million times. Linux solved this in the 1980s — the rest of us didn't.

Parth Dixit Posted on Jun 17           We've all pressed Ctrl+C a million times. Linux solved this in the 1980s — the rest of us didn't. # productivity Pay attention to the next thing you copy on your computer. Actually watch yourself do it. You don't do one thing. You do two: you select the text, then you press Ctrl+C . And if your hands are on the mouse, it's often worse — select, right-click, hunt for "Copy" in a menu, click it. Two steps, sometimes three. Pasting is the same trap. You don't just paste — you first click into the place you want the text to land (activate the field, position the cursor), then you press Ctrl+V . Two steps again. So the simplest possible action — move this text from here to there — is really four discrete actions: select, copy, click-to-place, paste. Now here's the part that got me: you do this maybe a thousand times a day. Coding, replying to messages, filling forms, moving a link, grabbing an error to paste into a search bar. It's so automatic you've stopped seeing it. It's the background radiation of using a computer. And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it. Why are we doing four things for one thing? Linux noticed this 40 years ago (and fixed half of it) Turns out one half of this was solved in the 1980s . On Linux/X11 there's something called the PRIMARY selection : you highlight text and it's already copied — no keystroke, no menu. The act of selecting is the act of copying. It's been sitting in the X Window System since 1984 . Mac and Windows never adopted it. So half the friction we all live with has had a fix for four decades — it just never crossed over. That bugged me enough to try building it. The result is Pluks , and the goal was to collapse those four actions down. Feel it in 2 seconds, no download: go to pluks.app and select any text on the page. It's already on your clipboard. The whole idea: 4 steps → fewer Copy becomes 1 step. You select text. That's it — it's copied. The select is t