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left and right ctrl key behaviour

gf flag

In certain applications trying to use ctrl-c to copy using the left ctrl key doesn't work but using the right ctrl key works as expected.

I'm on Ubuntu 21.10 but this has been happening in previous versions. My laptop is a Gigabyte Aorus 7 using the built in keyboard using US keyboard layout for the language setting.

I do not have this mapped as a custom shortcut anywhere.

For example, in Nemo or Nautilus I often want to copy the name of the file, or rename it from text I've copied from elsewhere. So, I press F2 on the file in order to then copy the text (or paste text to rename it).

This works fine with the right ctrl-c / ctrl-v combination.

With the left as soon as I hit the ctrl key it goes out of edit mode. It's like I've hit the escape key.

BUT in LibreOffice it works fine, just as expected. Both left and right ctrl-c / ctrl-v work fine.

Another application I use is a commercial tool called EdrawMax. This is a Visio like application for flow charting. It also has odd behaviour if I'm trying to copy items in it using left ctrl-c but works fine with right ctrl-c.

What gives?

24601 avatar
in flag
please [edit] your question to include the keyboard in use and the settings in `Language and Region`
Score:0
gf flag

I found out what the issue was. I had a setting enabled in Gnome Tweaks to highlight the mouse position by pressing the ctrl key. Disabling this fixed the issue. I had totally forgot about this and have been suffering with this issue for at least a year so hopefully this can cut short someone else's pain! Do not enable this option in tweaks.

enter image description here

user1660210 avatar
ao flag
The "funny" thing is, that description for this option is "Press the Ctrl key" not "Press the Left/Right Ctrl key" - which is highly confusing, because what this option do, is a different behaviour for right and left Ctrl key.
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