"Restoring" minimal & functional ctrl-k/ctrl-y kill/yank behavior

[lianos]

Howdy ... on macOS here.

I'm wondering if there are some easy keyboard binding tweaks I can add to my config that will restore minimal kill/yank behavior (no fancy kill ring history required) that's somehow ubiquitous in most text editors and system-level text entry boxes/areas across macOS and linux -- including in VS Code.

In Positron, however, this isn't quite supported. When typing in a text editor, ctrl-k does indeed kill to the end of the line, but ctrl-y won't restore the text.

I know there are plugins like "Awesome Emacs Keymap" that might/should come to the rescue but I don't want to go "all in" on emacs-type keybindings.

I tried installing the "Better Kill Ring" manually via download and local install. This almost works, but when the cursor is in Positron's Console tab, and I hit ctrl-k, it kills lines in the last used/active text editor tab instead of where my cursor is in the active Console.

Does anyone have any hints/tweaks I can make to restore even the most basic kill/yank actions to ctrl-k and ctrl-y?

I know it's a silly little thing, but my muscle memory is too deeply ingrained and I keep tripping over this 🥴.

Thanks!

[juliasilge]

I just worked through some examples in both VS Code and Positron, and for me, the behavior is the same in both. You can check out what is going on with keyboard shortcuts by running the command Preferences: Open Keyboard Shortcuts.

This is what I see in VS Code (nothing bound to Ctrl+Y):

And I see the same in Positron:

You can see the support for Ctrl+K similarly:

Can you look at VS Code and find what is providing the behavior you like for Ctrl+Y there? You should be able to use the same approach in Positron.

[lianos]

Thanks for the thorough/detailed response, Julia.

To my surprise, it does turn out that the yank behavior I'm enjoying in VS Code does seem to be provided by the Better Kill Ring extension and not VS Code itself -- I'm sorry for not checking that more thoroughly before posting here.

I noticed that a new version (1.0) of the Better Kill Ring extension is available since I last tried to "side load" it by downloading its*.vsix from GitHub, so I installed it again. Unfortunately it still suffers from killing lines in the text editor at the last place the active cursor was there when the cursor/focus is in the console ... I trip over that a lot.

I was looking through the "When" expressions for other key bindings in Positron, and noticed that there is a positronConsoleFocused condition I can play with. I added a && !positronConsoleFocused boolean clause to the end of all of the key bindings associated with the Better Kill Ring extension, and voila this works well enough for me now. I at least don't mangle the code in my text editors while trying to kill code interactively when focussed in the Console, so ... I think this is good enough for me now!

Thanks again!

[juliasilge]

That's great to hear! Thanks for sharing what is working for you 🙌